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The most common mistakes in Romanian delivery addresses, and how to correct them

Most broken Romanian addresses fail on five things: a postcode that does not match the locality, a village written without its county, a street type fused into the street name, two incompatible versions of ș and ț, and block details lost in free text. We checked each rule against Poșta Română's own data and the UPU addressing sheet, and found that several popular ‘fixes’ are wrong.

Published 2026-10-11

The short answer

A correct Romanian delivery address has a six-digit postcode written to the left of the locality, a locality that is unambiguous within its county, a thoroughfare type before the street name, and building details (block, staircase, floor, apartment) at the end of the street line. The most common mistakes are a postcode that belongs to a different locality or street segment, a village name given without its county, and street names that do not match the official list because of word order, titles or the wrong form of ș and ț.

The way to correct a Romanian address is to match it against the official postal nomenclature rather than guess: the postcode determines the county and, in large cities, the street segment, so a wrong postcode cannot be repaired by changing a digit or two.

How a Romanian postcode is built

A Romanian postcode has 6 digits and sits to the left of the locality name, according to the Universal Postal Union's addressing sheet for Romania. The UPU sheet describes the coding method: the first digit is the postal region, the second is a district of that region or, in Bucharest, the sector, and the remaining digits identify the delivery area. Its own examples are 060274 BUCHAREST and 200716 CRAIOVA.

In practice the first two digits identify a county. In Poșta Română's 2016 postal workbook, every locality-level code in Cluj county starts with 40, every one in Brașov county with 50, and every one in Ilfov with 07. A postcode with five digits, a space or a hyphen is therefore malformed, and a postcode whose first two digits point to a different county than the one written in the address is a red flag that the customer copied the code of another place.

The repair is a lookup, not arithmetic. Inside a large city, consecutive codes belong to different streets or even different number ranges of the same street, so ‘adding the missing digit’ or picking a code that looks close produces a valid-looking code for somebody else's street.

Bucharest: six sectors and the 0 prefix

Bucharest is divided into 6 sectors, a structure set out in the city's own council decisions. In a Bucharest postcode, the first digit is 0 and the second digit is the sector. We checked this against every one of the 12,400 rows in the Bucharest sheet of Poșta Română's 2016 postal workbook: all start with 0, and in all of them the second digit equals the sector column, with 0 mismatches.

Two corrections follow. If an address says ‘Sector 3’ and the postcode starts 06, one of them is wrong, and the street decides which. And a code starting 07 is not Bucharest at all: it is Ilfov county, which surrounds the capital, so towns next to Bucharest must be written with their own name and county, not as ‘Bucharest’. The UPU sheet allows the sector to be written on its own line between the street and the locality, as in its example Sector 6 above 061357 BUCHAREST.

Villages and communes: the locality is the address

Romanian law organises the territory into four kinds of unit: county, municipality, town and commune. A commune is a rural unit made up of one or more villages, and the village where the commune's administration sits is the commune seat. A customer in a village often writes the commune name, the village name, or both, and frequently leaves out the county.

Leaving out the county is the expensive mistake. In the locality-level sheet of the 2016 postal workbook, 1,364 locality names occur in more than one county; Izvoarele and Fântânele each occur in 16 counties. A village name alone is not an address.

Outside the large cities, Poșta Română assigns the postcode to the locality as a whole. The same workbook lists 13,803 smaller localities, each with its own single code and no street ranges. For a village, therefore, the correct check is that the postcode belongs to that village in that county; the street line matters to the courier, but it does not change the code.

Street names: type, order and titles

The UPU sheet says the thoroughfare type goes before the name (Strada, Bulevardul, Calea, Aleea, Șoseaua, Intrarea and so on), and the house number usually goes at the end of the street line. Customers abbreviate the type (Str., Bd., Sos., Al.) or fuse it into the name, which breaks exact matching.

Poșta Română's file stores the type and the name in separate columns and in a form that does not look like a street sign. The street everyone writes as Drumul Taberei appears as type Drum and name Taberei. Streets named after people are stored surname first, with the title as an abbreviated suffix: the street signed General Eremia Grigorescu is Grigorescu Eremia, g-ral.. In the Bucharest sheet alone, 427 street names carry a trailing title such as dr., prof., lt. or sold.

A matcher that wants to find these streets has to split the type from the name, reorder personal names, and treat the title as optional on both sides. Deleting titles from the customer's text is not enough, because the official record still carries them.

Diacritics: two versions of ș and ț

The correct Romanian letters are ș and ț with a comma below (Unicode U+0219 and U+021B). Older systems used the visually similar s and t with a cedilla (U+015F and U+0163), which Unicode treats as different characters. A customer typing on a phone, a shop database and a postal file can each use a different version, and an exact comparison then fails on a perfectly correct address.

The postal data itself uses the old form. We counted 45,201 cedilla s characters and 0 comma-below s characters in the 2016 workbook. The fix is to keep the correct comma-below letters in what you print, and to compare on a key that folds both forms, and the plain letters s and t, into one.

Block, staircase, floor and apartment

Romanian apartment addresses carry building details that a courier needs: block (bl.), staircase (sc.), floor (et., or parter for the ground floor) and apartment (ap.). The UPU sheet puts them at the end of the street line, as in its example Drumul Taberei nr. 35, bl. F5, sc. 2, parter, ap. 23.

The common mistake is not where these details are written but that they are lost: a checkout form with one short address field truncates them, or a parser treats bl. F5 as part of the street name. In large cities the block can also decide the postcode, because the postal file assigns some codes to named blocks rather than to number ranges. Keep the details, parse them into their own fields where you can, and never drop them to make a street match.

Where the report was wrong

Our starting report contained several confident rules that the official data contradicts.

Drumul Taberei. The report said Drumul Taberei is an area, not a street. Poșta Română lists it as a street, and the UPU uses it as the street line in its own Romanian example.

Titles. The report said official records omit titles such as General or Dr., so they can simply be stripped. The postal file keeps them, as a suffix after a reordered name.

Postcode repair. The report suggested fixing a short or garbled postcode by inserting a county digit, and gave an example of guessing a nearby Cluj-Napoca code. No source supports a mechanical repair; within a city, neighbouring codes belong to different streets.

Roads. The report rewrote national roads into invented forms such as ‘Șoseaua Națională 1’. We found no official source for that convention and dropped it.

Method

We started from an AI deep-research report on Romanian address errors. AI research engines can be wrong, so on 11 October 2026 we checked every rule kept here against primary sources: the UPU addressing sheet for Romania, the text of the law on Romania's administrative organisation, a Bucharest council decision on the sectors, Unicode's own records on the comma-below letters, and Poșta Română's postal workbook as published on the national open-data portal. The counts in this article come from our own reading of that workbook.

We could not verify the report's claims about historical locality renamings, its section on Czech, Polish, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Slovak address formats, or any official list of street aliases, so we left them out.

Limitations

The newest postal workbook Poșta Română has published as open data dates from 2016. Streets created or renamed since then are missing from it, and codes may have changed. The counts above describe that file, not today's postal network. For a live answer on a single address, Poșta Română's own postcode search remains the reference. This article covers addresses inside Romania only.

Sources

1. UPU, Romania: postcode and addressing sheet
2. Poșta Română, Coduri poștale România (INFOCOD, open data, OGL-ROU-1.0)
3. Poșta Română, postcode search
4. Legea nr. 2/1968 privind organizarea administrativă a teritoriului României
5. Consiliul General al Municipiului București, HCGMB 214/2001 (Bucharest composed of 6 sectors)
6. Unicode mailing list, U+015F (ş) vs. U+0219 (ș)

Questions and answers

How many digits does a Romanian postcode have?

A Romanian postcode has 6 digits with no spaces or hyphens, and it is written to the left of the locality name, for example 200716 CRAIOVA. According to the UPU addressing sheet, the first digit is the postal region, the second a district of that region or the sector in Bucharest, and the rest identify the delivery area. Together the first two digits identify the county.

How do I know which Bucharest sector a postcode belongs to?

In Bucharest the postcode starts with 0 and the second digit is the sector, from 1 to 6. In Poșta Română's 2016 workbook this held for all 12,400 Bucharest rows. So 061357 is in Sector 6. A code starting with 07 is not Bucharest at all: it belongs to Ilfov county, which surrounds the capital.

Do Romanian villages have street-level postcodes?

Usually not. Outside Bucharest and the large cities, Poșta Română assigns one postcode to each locality. Its 2016 workbook lists 13,803 smaller localities, each with a single code. For a village, the important checks are that the village, the county and the postcode belong together; the street line helps the courier but does not change the code.

Why does an exact street match fail on a correct Romanian address?

Because the official postal file does not store streets the way people write them. It separates the type from the name, writes personal names surname first and keeps titles as suffixes, so General Eremia Grigorescu appears as Grigorescu Eremia, g-ral. It also uses the old cedilla form of ș and ț. A matcher needs to normalise type, word order, titles and diacritics before comparing.

Can I fix a wrong Romanian postcode by changing one digit?

No. Inside large cities, neighbouring codes belong to different streets or different number ranges of the same street, so a code that looks close is usually someone else's. Look the address up instead: match locality and county, then the street and number, against Poșta Română's postcode search or its published nomenclature.

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