August 2026 registrations put PFA at 41.3% of new businesses — but the long record shows this is not the end of a slow glide toward sole-trader forms. It is a break.

For most of the past decade, the question of how Romanians register a business had a boring answer. They formed a limited liability company (SRL), and the gap between SRL and everything else barely moved. That stability is now gone, and it is worth being precise about when it went.

In August 2026, Romania recorded 8,103 new registrations. Of those, 4,419 were SRLs and 3,350 were PFA, the sole-trader form. That puts the PFA share at 41.3% and the SRL share at 54.5%.

The share that barely moved

Comparing like with like — the same calendar month each year, which controls for the strong seasonal swings in Romanian registration data — August’s SRL share held in a narrow band for most of the past decade:

August	SRL share	PFA share
2017	66.0%	20.1%
2019	68.0%	18.1%
2021	68.1%	19.1%
2023	68.6%	24.2%
2025	66.6%	29.9%
2026	54.5%	41.3%

(August shares by year)

For six Augusts running, the SRL share sat in a band of roughly 66–69%. There was no gradual erosion. The movement that did occur before 2025 showed up on the PFA side in 2023 and 2024 — PFA climbed from about 18–19% to 24% while SRL held flat, meaning the two forms were growing together, not trading places.

The break is recent and fast. Between August 2025 and August 2026, SRL registrations fell 41.95% year-over-year, from 7,613 to 4,419. PFA registrations fell just 1.9% over the same period, from 3,415 to 3,350. That asymmetry — not a general collapse — is what moved the mix.

So the pattern is not a decade-long drift. It is a decade of structural stability followed by eighteen months of asymmetric decline, in which the SRL form took almost all of the damage.

Is 41.3% a ceiling?

The record says no — or at least, August 2026 is not itself the peak. PFA’s high point in the current window is 42.2%, set in July 2026, one month earlier. On the July figures, PFA registered 4,662 against 5,963 SRL.

August’s 41.3% is therefore a step back from the high, not a new one. And it is worth noting that August is not a neutral month for this comparison. August is a seasonally weak month — rank 10 of 12 by mean registrations, at 10,681. August 2026’s 8,103 was 26.66% below July’s 11,049. A small denominator amplifies whatever shifts underneath it. A single month at 41.3% after 42.2% does not establish a ceiling, because nothing in the data suggests the ratio has stopped moving.

The trajectory, stated carefully

Reading the full record, the entity mix looks less like a trend line and more like a step change with a delay. From 2017 to 2024, SRL share held flat. From 2023 onward, PFA share rose noticeably while SRL held. Then, from late 2025, SRL formation fell away sharply while PFA held roughly steady, mechanically inflating PFA’s share.

That last step is the one that matters most for interpretation, because it is the only one driven by absolute decline rather than growth in the other category. Total August registrations fell 29.14% year-over-year, from 11,435 to 8,103. The SRL decline of 41.95% is steeper than the overall decline; the PFA decline of 1.9% is far shallower. PFA did not grow into its share. It held still while the SRL form contracted around it.

What the exits say

The lifecycle data reinforces that this is not a registration-side curiosity. In August 2026, Romania recorded 8,744 total business exits — 1,015 suspensions, 3,198 dissolutions, and 4,531 deregistrations — against 8,103 registrations, a churn rate of 107.91% and net growth of −641.

August 2026 is the ninth consecutive month of net-negative growth, a run that began in December 2025 and has cumulatively subtracted 16,756 businesses. Notably, the streak is not accelerating — August’s −641 was the second-mildest month of the nine, and net growth is improving, with the month’s net figure running 389 better than the prior trend.

Exits are also falling faster than registrations: suspensions down 31.42% year-over-year, dissolutions down 31.0%, and deregistrations down 19.0%. Both sides of the ledger are contracting. That is a consolidation picture, not a churn story.

Where the mix shifts

Entity choice is not uniform across sectors. In August 2026, transport and warehousing led all industries with 1,515 registrations — but down only 6.02% year-over-year, the shallowest decline among major sectors and by far the largest single block. Retail and auto repair, the largest sector as recently as August 2025 at 1,892 registrations, fell 38.11% to 1,171. Construction fell 33.05%, information and communications just 2.69%.

The two industries that actually grew in August 2026 were financial intermediation and insurance, up 16.2%, and agriculture, up 4.2%. Both are small in absolute terms — 165 and 149 registrations — but they are the only two sectors in the top fifteen moving in the positive direction.

Geographically, Bucharest alone accounted for 28.1% of August registrations, at 2,276, with Ilfov second at 567. The capital’s concentration means the national entity mix is heavily weighted by urban, service-sector registration behavior — a caveat worth keeping in mind when reading national share figures.

A structural note on the long window

One caution on any multi-year reading. The registry data shows a dramatic discontinuity between 2016 and 2017: August 2016 recorded 80,672 registrations and August 2015 recorded 70,654, against 9,451 in August 2017. That is a change of roughly an order of magnitude in a single year and does not represent a real economic event — it reflects a change in what the registry counts or how it reports. Any long-horizon entity-mix comparison should therefore treat 2017 onward as the trustworthy window, which is the window used above.

The conclusion

August 2026’s 41.3% PFA share sits just below the 42.2% reached in July 2026, so it is near the top of the observed range — but “near a ceiling” implies a limit the data does not show. PFA share has moved from roughly 18% to above 40% in the space of three years, and the most recent months show it still climbing.

The more defensible conclusion concerns the shape of the change, not its level. This was not a decade-long, consistent decline in the SRL share. The SRL share was effectively flat for most of the trustworthy record, and what movement there was before 2025 came from PFA growth rather than SRL contraction. The sharp move in the ratio is recent, asymmetric, and driven primarily by a fall in SRL formations — with exits falling too, and net growth negative for nine months. The current entity mix is best read as the continuation of a trajectory that began around 2023 and accelerated in late 2025, not as an outlier month — but it is a trajectory built on a shrinking registration base, which is a different thing from a growing preference for sole-trader forms.