Thresholds: why a small rise in income can cost a lot
Intuition says that if you bring in ten percent more, you pay ten percent more. On several of the most important lines in Romanian taxation that intuition is false — and it is false exactly when you have the least time left to react.
Updated
A step is not a slope
A slope means every extra unit costs the same as the last. A step means thousands cost nothing extra, and then a single one costs a month of work. Contributions on ceilings, moving from one tax regime to another, crossing into VAT — all of these are steps, not slopes.
So the useful question is not "what do I pay at this income", but "how far am I from the next step". The second has an answer you can act on; the first has one you merely receive.
The date matters as much as the amount
Because most thresholds are counted per calendar year, the same invoice sent on 28 December and on 3 January can land on different sides of a step. This is not a loophole and not a trick — it is how the rule is built, and all you need in order to account for it is to know where you stand before the year ends, rather than after.
It is also why a threshold watched continuously is worth more than one checked once a year: the information is only useful while you can still do something with it.
Why the numbers are not written here
Ceilings have moved several times in recent years, and some tax bands have disappeared entirely. An article that wrote a figure today would become false without a word in it changing, and would be read just as confidently.
So the mechanism lives here, and the figure lives in the app, where it is worked out from your records and carries with it the year and the rule it rests on.