Social contributions
Mandatory social contributions are withheld from the employee’s gross salary (CAS – pension, CASS – health), while CAM is borne by the employer and is not deducted from the employee’s net.
Before any income tax is worked out, three mandatory social contributions sit on a Romanian salary. Two of them, CAS and CASS, are withheld from the employee’s gross pay and reduce the net. The third, CAM, is paid by the employer on top of the gross and never comes out of your net — it belongs to the cost of employing you, not to your payslip. All three are charged on the gross salary (câștigul brut), with no upper ceiling on standard employment.
What the employee pays: CAS and CASS
CAS — the social-insurance contribution (contribuția de asigurări sociale) — funds the public pension system and is withheld at 25 % of the gross. CASS — the health-insurance contribution (contribuția de asigurări sociale de sănătate) — funds public healthcare and is withheld at 10 % of the gross. Together they take 35 % of gross pay off the top, before the personal deduction and the income tax are even considered.
| Contribution | Paid by | Rate on gross |
|---|---|---|
| CAS (pension) | Employee | 25 % |
| CASS (health) | Employee | 10 % |
| CAM (work insurance) | Employer | 2,25 % |
CAS vs CASS: what the difference actually is
The two employee contributions differ by one letter and are constantly mixed up, so it is worth being blunt about it. CAS is the pension contribution and CASS is the health contribution. That is the whole difference in substance — where the money goes.
Everything else about them is the same shape: both are owed by the employee, both are withheld by the employer from the gross rather than paid by you separately, both are charged on the same base — gross salary earnings, with no upper ceiling on standard employment — and both come off before income tax is worked out, which is why they shrink the base the tax is then applied to. What differs is the rate: 25 % for CAS against 10 % for CASS, 35 % of the gross between them.
A third abbreviation, CAM, belongs to a different column altogether: it is the employer’s, not yours, and the next section is about it. If you are reading a Romanian payslip, CAS and CASS are the two lines that reduce what you receive; CAM is not on your side of the ledger at all.
What the employer pays: CAM
On top of your gross salary, the employer owes the work-insurance contribution (contribuția asiguratorie pentru muncă, CAM) at 2,25 % of the gross. It is a genuine cost of the job, but it is the employer’s cost — it is never deducted from your net. The calculator shows it on its own line, as part of the total employer cost, so you can see the full price of a salary without confusing it with your take-home figure.
Part-time contracts below the minimum wage
There is one overlay worth knowing about. When a part-time contract pays a monthly gross below the minimum wage, CAS and CASS may be charged not on the actual low gross but on the full minimum wage instead, pro-rated to the working days the contract was active. The law lists exceptions — students up to 26, apprentices under 18, workers with disabilities, old-age pensioners, and people holding several contracts whose combined base already reaches the minimum wage — and where the clamp does apply, the difference is borne by the employer on the employee’s behalf. This rule only ever bites a below-minimum part-time contract; it is irrelevant to a standard full-time salary, and the details are still being confirmed.
Difficult and special working conditions (employer-side). For posts formally classified as arduous or hazardous under the pension law, the employer owes an extra 4 % or 8 % of CAS on top of the standard rate. These increments are borne entirely by the employer, never withheld from the employee, and they fall outside the standard calculation on this page — they are noted here only so the picture is complete.
The full content for this page is still being written.