Romania registered 6,912 companies in September 2026, down 53.3% from the 14,815 recorded a year earlier. Transport and warehousing held 17.1% of that total — below its own September 2024 share and below its two-year September average. Yet the five largest sectors kept their same slots in the same order, and no mid-sized or large industry disappeared from the table. The sectors genuinely going quiet sit in the tail, among categories with monthly counts in the tens where a single dozen registrations move the percentage by tens of points.

Romania recorded 6,912 company registrations in September 2026, against 14,815 in September 2025 — a fall of 53.3%. That is not a rounding difference, and it is not seasonality: September is the ninth-strongest of twelve calendar months by long-run average, with a mean of 11,385 registrations. September is a middling month, normally a shade above August. In 2026 it came in below August instead: 6,912 versus 8,103, a month-on-month decline of 14.7%. The 12-month moving average has slipped from 12,627 to 11,968.

Transport below its own September pattern

Transport and warehousing took 1,181 registrations in September, or 17.1% of the month’s total. Against transport’s own September record: in September 2025 it held 2,151 registrations and 14.5% of a 14,815 total; in September 2024 it was 1,344, or 22.2% of that month’s registrations. September 2026’s share is therefore lower than September 2024’s and below the 21.6% transport averaged across the 2024 and 2025 September readings, though it sits above the unusually depressed September 2025 figure.

The composition of the drop matters more than the share itself. Transport’s absolute count is down 45.1% year-on-year, slightly less bad than the 53.3% market average, which is precisely why its share fell rather than rose: it lost volume, but lost proportionally less than everything else. The second-largest sector, wholesale and retail trade plus vehicle repair, tells the opposite story — 1,004 registrations, down 52.6%, almost exactly the market rate, leaving its share essentially pinned at 14.5%. Retail did not retreat in any meaningful relative sense; it simply shrank with the tide.

The sectors that genuinely gained ground relative to the rest are information and communications (737, down only 29.9%) and professional, scientific and technical activities (722, down 50.5%). Professional services held 10.4% of the month against 9.8% in the prior September. Construction, by contrast, fell 53.6%, matching the headline.

What is genuinely absent

None of the five largest sectors went thin or missing in September — transport, trade, IT, professional services and construction occupied the same five slots, in the same order relative to one another, as they did in August and in July. What has gone thin sits far below the top of the table:

• Water supply, sewerage and waste management recorded 10 registrations in September, down from 31 a year earlier — a 67.7% fall. Against August’s 12 and May’s 18, this is a sector that has been running at low-double-digit monthly volumes all year.
• Agriculture, forestry and fishing dropped out of the top five entirely, sitting in eleventh place at 218 registrations. That is a striking reversal for the only sector in the entire September table to post year-on-year growth: agriculture is up 29.0% against September 2025. It held a top-ten place as recently as June, with 256 registrations. Its absence from September’s top five is a function of scale, not collapse — 218 is too small to reach a top five whose floor is 628.
• Private household activities hit exactly zero in September. It registered 0 in June too, and 1 in May, and 4 in August 2025. This is not a finding about the economy; it is a residual statistical category that produces single digits and zeros in most months.
• Public administration and defence registered 1, unchanged from a year earlier, against 2 in April and 3 in June — a category whose counts are too small to carry any signal at all.

September’s absent sectors are absent because they are small and never were large. Any reading of a collapse in waste management or agriculture rests on monthly counts where a dozen registrations move the percentage by tens of points. What can be said with confidence is that no mid-sized or large sector vanished from the table — there is no missing sixth- or seventh-ranked industry in the September data. The absence is at the tail, not in the middle.

The context that outweighs the sector detail

Sector-level percentages for September 2026 should be read against an ecosystem in sustained contraction. Romania has now gone ten consecutive months with more business exits than registrations, a run that began in December 2025, with a cumulative net loss of 17,473 firms. For comparison, September 2025 was the last time the register was net-positive, adding 1,864 firms.

September’s exits totalled 7,629 — comprising 845 temporary suspensions, 2,875 dissolutions and 3,909 deregistrations — against 6,912 registrations, a churn rate of 110.4%. The gap is narrow: 717 more companies left the register than joined it. That is among the mildest monthly deficits in the ten-month sequence, and all three exit categories fell sharply year-on-year — suspensions by 46.8%, dissolutions by 46.2%, deregistrations by 35.1%. Both entry and exit are running at roughly half of 2025 levels. That pattern is more consistent with a broadly slowing registration and closure pipeline than with a wave of failures.

Geography reinforces the sector picture

The regional data does not add a separate story so much as confirm that the contraction is universal. Bucharest accounted for 25.7% of September registrations, with 1,779 — a share that underlines how concentrated activity remains in the capital. Ilfov followed at 510, then Timiș at 337 and Cluj at 330. On growth, no county in the comparison set expanded: the least-affected, Ialomița, fell 35.4%, while Covasna registered 21 against 86 a year earlier, a decline of 75.6%. That ranking sorts by growth, so a list of top growing counties containing only declines is itself the finding. There is no region of Romania where new business formation held its 2025 level in September.

The reading that would be wrong

Framing September around which sector gained share would invert the actual mechanics. Transport took a larger slice of a shrinking pie not because transport activity is robust but because its decline was milder than retail’s. The genuinely resilient categories by year-on-year change are agriculture (+29.0%), information and communications (−29.9%) and financial intermediation (−29.6%) — two of them far too small or too steady to drive the headline. And the sectors that are absent are the ones with counts in the tens, where a single month’s fluctuation is indistinguishable from noise.

What September 2026 supports is a claim about breadth rather than rotation: ten straight months of net contraction, a 12-month average sliding downward, every county in the comparison negative, and an absence story confined to categories whose monthly totals are too small to interpret. Transport’s sub-18% share is real and below its own recent September pattern, but it is a symptom of relative decline, not evidence of a sector losing its footing faster than the economy around it.