When an entrepreneur picks a location, the first question is usually "which city?". Our new database of commercial asking rents says the second question matters just as much: which neighbourhood, which street, which floor and which unit size. Inside one Romanian city, those choices move the rent by as much as the gap between two counties.
Bucharest sets the ceiling, most counties sit at €8–10
The median asking rent for retail space is about €20/sqm a month in Bucharest. Ilfov follows at €15.7, then the counties of the largest regional cities: Iași €15, Cluj €14, Brașov €13.3, Timiș and Constanța €12. The other 26 counties with enough data of their own sit at a median of €10, and most counties fall between €8 and €10. The lowest median, €6.4, is in Sălaj.
Figure 1: Median asking retail rent by county, EUR/sqm/month, October 2026. Hatched: nine small counties grouped, with a joint median of €9.
Figure 2: The most expensive counties against the rest, retail, EUR/sqm/month, October 2026.
Offices follow almost the same ranking: €13.5 in Bucharest + Ilfov against an average of about €9.6 in the rest of the country, with county medians from €5.5 to €11. Industrial halls barely differ: €6/sqm in the capital region against €4.5 in the rest of the country.
Inside one city, the neighbourhood can double the rent
The bigger story is inside the cities. In Bucharest, the median asking rent for retail space ranges from €14/sqm in Tineretului to €30/sqm in Floreasca, a factor of 2.2. In Iași the gap between the cheapest and the dearest neighbourhood is 2.7 times, in Sibiu 2.6, in Constanța 2.4 and in Timișoara 2.3. Even the most even cities, Cluj-Napoca, Craiova and Brașov, show 1.4–1.6 times.
Figure 3: Median asking retail rent in the cheapest and the dearest neighbourhood of each city, EUR/sqm/month, October 2026.
Put differently: outside Bucharest, the median retail rent varies about 2.5 times between the cheapest and the most expensive county. Within a single large city, the neighbourhood alone can produce the same spread.
The unit itself moves the price too
Three features of the space matter almost as much as its location:
- Size: tenants of retail units under 50 sqm pay about twice as much per sqm as tenants of units over 1,000 sqm (index 126 vs 61, county median = 100).
- Floor: upper floors and basements are offered about 30% below the ground floor, and a street-front shop window asks about 16% more than a ground floor without one.
- Street: a pedestrian street adds about 30% to the county median, a mall or shopping gallery about 13%, while houses and standalone commercial buildings sit 15–20% below it.
For offices, condition matters as much as size: new or renovated space asks about 17% more than finished space. For halls, volume brings the discount: units over 3,000 sqm are offered about 14% below the county median.
Prime is a different market
Prime units rarely reach the listed market. Published broker figures put prime rent in the dominant shopping centres at €87/sqm in Bucharest, €65 in Cluj, €55 in Timișoara and Iași, €50 in Constanța and €40 in Brașov: 3 to 4.6 times the median listed rent of the same county. High-street prime in Bucharest is around €65. For a brand, a prime unit is a separate budget line, not a premium on the market average.
What stands behind the numbers
Every figure here comes from the Popa Advisory commercial rents database: 13,450 retail spaces, offices and halls, more than 1,000 micro-areas and localities, all 41 counties and Bucharest, tracking more than ten attributes per space, from size, floor and shop window to condition, building type, street class and distance to the centre. We estimate it covers about 86% of the listed market.
Figure 4: The Popa Advisory commercial rents database, October 2026.
That granularity is what lets us answer practical questions: what an 80 sqm unit with a shop window should cost on a given street in Cluj, which neighbourhoods in Timișoara offer the best rent for a café, or how much a landlord gives up when the space is upstairs.
What it means for your next location
For tenants, the message is to choose the street, the position and the size first; the city only sets the base. For landlords and investors, the same data shows where a unit is under- or over-priced against its micro-area. If you are planning a new location or reviewing a portfolio, I would be glad to walk you through the numbers for your addresses in a three-hour strategic context workshop. Write to dragos@popaadvisory.com.
Dragos Popa, Popa Advisory · Asking rents, EUR/sqm/month, excluding VAT, October 2026. Prime figures: CBRE Romania Retail Figures Q2 2026 (Bucharest); Cushman & Wakefield Echinox, Marketbeat Retail Q2 2026 (regional cities).
