For two years, the Government has suspended the indexation of pensions to inflation rates. In this context, The Foundation For The Defense The Citizens Of Citizens Against State Abuses (FACIAS) has asked the Ombudsman to refer to the Constitutional Court of Romania (CCR) the unconstitutionality of the provisions of Law No. 141/2025, which ordered to maintain the index reference point at 81 lei for the year 2026. This austerity measure deprives 4.9 million Romanian pensioners of the legal increase in income and generates significant losses for a large and vulnerable category of citizens, in an economic context marked by high inflation.
The mechanism of indexation of pensions is intended to protect the real value of incomes and to ensure the predictability of the patrimonial rights of Romanian seniors. In this regard, Law no. 360/2023 on the public pension system expressly establishes the state's obligation to annually update the value of the reference point, in January, with the average inflation rate and with 50% of the real increase in the average gross wage, indicators communicated by the National Institute of Statistics.
However, by Article XXXI of Law no. 141/2025, which entered into force on July 28, 2025, the Government decided to maintain the value of the reference point at the current level of 81 lei for 2026 and to suspend the indexation mechanism until 2027. As a result, the 4.9 million Romanian pensioners will not benefit this year from the legal increase estimated at around 7%, even though it should have been applied automatically, under the legislation in force, from January 1, 2026.
The effects of this decision are already visible. On the basis of accumulated inflation in the years 2024 and 2025, estimates indicate that the non-application of indexation has already generated an average loss of about 19% of the real value of the pension. In net figures, the losses are about 535 lei per month per pensioner, strictly resulting from not adjusting the value of the reference point, which should have reached about 107 lei in 2026.
In Romania of 2026, more than 924,000 seniors are condemned to live on a minimum pension of 1,281 lei per month, an amount that no longer means living, but mere survival. The Romanian state's indifference to their needs violates their right to a decent standard of living as provided for in Article 47 of the Romanian Constitution and represents an abuse by which the state condemns one in five elderly people in Romania to extreme poverty.
In its complaint submitted to the Ombudsman, FACIAS points out that these provisions violate several constitutional provisions, including the right to a pension, the principle of legal certainty, the protection of acquired rights and the requirement of proportionality in restricting the exercise of fundamental rights. The repeated suspension of a legal mechanism of a permanent nature, without clear criteria and without a foreseeable deadline for its reinstatement, transforms a measure declared temporary into a permanent measure, contrary to the settled case-law of the Constitutional Court.
FACIAS asks the Ombudsman to exercise its constitutional power to refer the matter directly to the Constitutional Court of Romania in order to verify the constitutionality of Article XXXI of Law no. 141/2025 and to restore the application of the legal mechanism of indexation of pensions.
Budgetary adjustments cannot be achieved by sacrificing the fundamental rights of a vulnerable social category such as pensioners, and the state has a duty to respect the social contract assumed by law.