Romania registered 11,049 new businesses in July 2026, down 27.2% from 15,168 a year earlier. But the more consequential change is in the composition of those registrations, and it is not spread evenly across the economy.

SRLs accounted for 5,963 of July’s registrations, while PFAs accounted for 4,662. A year earlier, the split was 10,832 SRLs and 3,886 PFAs. In share terms, SRLs fell from 71.4% of the total to 54.0%, while PFAs rose from 25.6% to 42.2%. The SRL-to-PFA ratio narrowed from roughly 2.8 to 1.3.

The context matters. July marked the eighth consecutive month of negative net business formation, with a monthly net of -1,030 and a cumulative shortfall of -16,115 since the streak began in December 2025. Yet the exit side is easing, not accelerating: suspensions fell 22.9% year over year, dissolutions fell 18.0% and deregistrations fell 9.6%. The rebalancing is happening on the entry side of the ledger, not in a wave of closures.

The geography: broad-based, but not uniform

To test whether the composition change is national or confined to a few hotspots, county-level data was pulled for 19 counties, including every top-volume registration county. The result is unambiguous on shares: the PFA share of registrations rose in all 19 counties, and the SRL share fell in all 19.

But the mechanism is not the same everywhere. PFA counts rose in only 16 of the 19 counties. In Dolj, PFA registrations fell from 220 to 168; in Sibiu they slipped from 105 to 100; in Teleorman they dropped from 26 to 19. In each of those counties the PFA share still rose because SRL registrations fell much faster — in Dolj, for example, SRLs fell from 386 to 128, making PFAs the majority form at 55.3% despite an absolute decline of their own.

That arithmetic, not substitution, is the under-appreciated part of the story. In Brașov, PFA registrations were essentially flat (146 to 148), but the PFA share jumped from 27.1% to 39.8% because SRLs fell 44.4%. In Sibiu, both forms shrank, yet the mix shifted by 19 percentage points. The composition is changing in nearly every county, but in several of them it is changing because one form is disappearing faster than the other is growing.

The county-level map also shows genuine variety. Bucharest is now nearly at parity, with SRLs falling from 2,020 to 1,488 and PFAs rising from 1,134 to 1,286. Iași flipped to PFA-majority, with PFAs at 49.2% after SRLs fell from 476 to 201. Ilfov, by contrast, remained distinctly SRL-heavy at 74.1% SRL share, and Teleorman barely moved, with SRLs still at 69.3%. Harghita added a third wrinkle: SRLs fell from 74 to 31, PFAs were roughly flat, and individual enterprises (II) rose from 19 to 29, becoming nearly a third of the county’s registrations. The retreat from the SRL form does not always land on the PFA form.

The sector pattern is narrow

The industry data does not split by legal form, so the sector test is inferential — but the inference is strong. Only four of the fifteen tracked sectors grew year over year: transport and storage (+4.4%, to 2,307 registrations), agriculture (+16.1%, to 173), financial intermediation and insurance (+28.6%, to 252), and IT and communications (+2.5%, to 971). Every other sector contracted, with the steepest falls in hospitality (-58.2%), manufacturing (-56.0%), administrative and support services (-45.2%), and construction (-34.0%).

The growth and the decline sit on opposite sides of the entity-type line. Transport and agriculture are fields where authorised-person and individual-enterprise forms are common; construction, manufacturing and hospitality are typically incorporated as SRLs. The registry data cannot establish entrepreneurs’ motives, but it does show that the growth is concentrated in sectors that lean toward simpler legal forms while the decline is concentrated in sectors that lean toward the SRL. The mix shift is broad on the map and narrow in the sectors.

What the data shows

The evidence supports a qualified conclusion: the SRL-to-PFA rebalancing is broad-based across counties but concentrated sectorally, and a meaningful part of it is mechanical rather than a genuine switch in legal form. A shrinking SRL denominator is inflating PFA shares even where PFA counts are flat or falling.

The broader ecosystem figures reinforce that this is a composition story, not a growth story. National churn was 109.3% in July, with 12,079 exits against 11,049 registrations, and the strain is uneven: Argeș posted 155.4% churn and Cluj 135.2%, while Bucharest was at 85.3% and Ilfov at 72.4%. Seasonality also does not explain the decline: July’s historical mean is 11,926 registrations, ranking it 7th of the 12 calendar months — a mid-table month, not a summer trough.

The picture that emerges is of a registration base that is being redrawn less by a rise in PFA registrations than by a steep retreat in incorporated formations, concentrated in construction, manufacturing, trade and hospitality. Where new activity is still appearing — transport, agriculture, IT and finance — it is increasingly arriving in simpler legal forms. That is a change in the mix, not in the mass.