In period photographs, interwar Romania has the air of an urban Sunday, with neatly placed hats, uniforms with shiny buttons, gentlemen in stiff suits, ladies wearing gloves, serious schoolchildren, and clerks who seem to have signed ordinary documents with the same gravity with which the country’s leaders signed peace treaties. Behind this elegance, the monthly salary remained the most honest social document. It quickly showed who had a heated room, who could afford new shoes, who could drink coffee at Capșa without consulting his wallet like an oracle, and who lived between rent, bread, firewood, and small domestic calculations.

When we talk about interwar salaries, caution becomes mandatory. The leu of the 1930s moved through an unstable economic world, affected by the aftermath of the First World War, inflation, the Great Depression, and the major differences between Bucharest, industrial towns, and the Romanian countryside. Figures from 1927, 1934–1935, or 1938 describe different salary frameworks. That is precisely why a proper comparison requires two apparently boring but vital things: the year and the source.

At the top of the hierarchy, the state paid certain public positions very well. At the bottom of the system, physical labor, especially agricultural or unskilled work, remained poorly paid, even when it was hard, dirty, dangerous, or all of them at once — the full version of social reality.

The top of the pyramid: dignitaries, generals, patriarchs, and senior magistrates

In a data set synthesized by historian Ioan Scurtu for interwar incomes, the President of the Council of Ministers appears with 60,000 lei per month, a minister with 54,000 lei, the Patriarch with 55,000 lei, the first president of the High Court of Cassation and Justice with 55,000 lei, and an army corps general with 53,500 lei. An ambassador and a metropolitan bishop each appear with 42,500 lei, while an undersecretary of state appears with 38,500 lei.

These values placed the administrative elite in a very rare material zone. The same source notes that, in central administration, there were 54 people, meaning 0.12% of the total, with salaries higher than 25,000 lei, while 77.44% received under 5,000 lei. The state’s display window was gilded; the back storeroom was full of minor civil servants, copyists, agents, ushers, and clerks who kept the institutions moving, with far less glory in their pockets.

Another reference point appears in the Radio România Actualități material produced with Prof. Dr. Gheorghe Iacob, where fragments are reproduced from the work Romania in the Age of Modernization (1859–1939). In the register of positions from the general state budget for the years 1934–1935, for example, a marshal appears with 35,100 lei, a minister with 30,400 lei, a patriarch with 31,550 lei, a metropolitan bishop with between 23,500 and 28,350 lei, a division general with 25,450 lei, and a county prefect with between 16,750 and 17,250 lei.

The differences between these data sets have to do with the year, the budget, seniority grades, and salary changes. The general picture, however, remains clear: the highest public offices could earn more than twenty times, and sometimes more than forty times, as much as an unskilled wage earner.

Professors and the prestige of the academic chair

Teachers, especially university professors, occupied a surprisingly good material position from today’s point of view. In Ioan Scurtu’s data, a university professor appears with 17,000 lei per month, the chief physician of the Capital with 18,000 lei, and a county senior physician with 12,000 lei. In the 1934–1935 budgetary register, a university professor with six seniority grades appears with between 25,350 and 29,550 lei, while a university lecturer with six seniority grades appears with between 17,750 and 19,150 lei.

In secondary education, the situation was good compared with many industrial salaries. An ARACIS synthesis on the evolution of Romanian education mentions approximately 8,000 lei per month for a high school teacher, 4,000–5,000 lei for a primary school teacher, and up to 26,000 lei for a full university professor. The same source compares this amount with the salary of a prime minister, a formulation that must be read with caution, because other interwar salary grids indicate different values for government positions.

The university chair offered prestige and considerable income. Ioan Scurtu cites Iorgu Iordan’s assessment that a chair in higher education in Old Romania was “worth” as much as a good estate, with the advantage of a secure income. The image is delicious and says a great deal about the status of the university professor in a society where the diploma, the position, and the good coat still walked together along the pavement.

Civil servants had status, stability, and sacrifice curves

The civil servant was one of the central figures of Greater Romania. After 1918, the state had new provinces to administer, laws to standardize, archives to put in order, schools, courts, prefectures, and ministries that had to speak the same bureaucratic language. The number of civil servants increased after 1918, and the Statute of Civil Servants, voted in June 1923 and entering into force on January 1, 1924, attempted to bring order to this world. Ioan Scurtu notes that the statute provided for a unified system of classification and promotion, job stability, a 7-hour working day, and a ban on declaring strikes.

ANFP confirms the general framework: after the war there was poverty, inflation, poor pay, the need for a statute, clear conditions for admission and promotion, and the desire for job stability. The statute of June 19, 1923, included administrative officials, military personnel, gendarmes, members of the teaching corps, members of the diplomatic and consular corps, and priests, with explicit exclusions for some categories, including metropolitans and bishops.

Average salaries by ministry, indicated by Ioan Scurtu for 1934–1935, show a telling hierarchy. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs had an average salary of 9,257.60 lei, the Presidency of the Council of Ministers 8,055.56 lei, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce 6,294.27 lei, the Ministry of National Defense 5,815.38 lei, the Ministry of Public Works 5,638.44 lei, the Ministry of Agriculture 5,438.59 lei, and the Ministry of Justice 5,194.35 lei. At the bottom of the list appear the Ministry of Labor, Health, and Social Protection with 4,409.98 lei, the Ministry of Education, Religious Affairs, and the Arts with 3,791.45 lei, Finance with 3,416.83 lei, and Internal Affairs with 3,162 lei.

The economic crisis also struck this apparently stable world. ANFP mentions the so-called “sacrifice curves,” salary cuts applied in December 1930, September 1932, and February 1933, followed by the availability framework for civil servants in 1933.

Police officers, postal workers, lawyers, miners, and mid-ranking employees

According to the Law on Salary Harmonization of June 1927, cited by Ioan Scurtu, a county school inspector reached 10,500 lei, a tenured secondary school teacher 8,990 lei, a police commissioner 5,920 lei, and a police sergeant between 2,510 and 3,120 lei. A postal director earned 19,500 lei, a postal clerk between 5,950 and 7,360 lei, a postal worker between 2,700 and approximately 3,760 lei, a trainee lawyer between 5,950 and 7,360 lei, a mining foreman between 3,120 and 4,100 lei, and an unskilled laborer 2,700 lei.

The 1934–1935 budgetary register completes the picture with concrete positions: third-class lawyer between 5,650 and 8,300 lei, second-class librarian at 8,600 lei, army captain between 8,500 and 9,350 lei, police quaestor between 10,300 and 10,600 lei, colonel between 16,700 and 18,050 lei, engineer between 3,300 and 19,500 lei, primary teacher with three seniority grades between 5,550 and 10,500 lei, second-class senior locomotive mechanic between 4,288 and 5,535 lei, notary between 1,900 and 4,000 lei, driver between 1,900 and 5,350 lei, and usher between 2,400 and 3,240 lei.

These figures give a more nuanced image than the simple division between “rich” and “poor.” In the 1934–1935 register, a driver at the upper limit of the grid, 5,350 lei, could exceed a clerk, a notary, or an usher positioned in the lower or middle part of their own grids. A locomotive mechanic had major responsibility and an income above many modest positions. A librarian or a primary teacher with seniority grades lived decently in a society where education still carried considerable value on the market of prestige.

Wage earners by sector in 1938

For the year 1938, Ioan Scurtu provides a list of average salaries by sector. Extractive industry appears with 2,361 lei, the food industry with 2,118 lei, graphic arts with 2,005 lei, transport and storage with 2,000 lei, commercial professions with 1,974 lei, leather and fur with 1,949 lei, the lime, ceramics, and glass industry with 1,906 lei, the textile industry with 1,904 lei, the chemical industry with 1,861 lei, metallurgy and mechanics with 1,799 lei, wood and furniture with 1,771 lei, construction with 1,752 lei, agricultural professions with 1,680 lei, and the art and precision industry with 1,600 lei. Unskilled wage earners appear separately, with 1,457 lei.

Thus, in 1938, wage earners in the listed sectors generally had averages between 1,600 and 2,361 lei, with unskilled workers below this range. By comparison, a tenured secondary school teacher in the grid cited by Ioan Scurtu had 8,990 lei, while a university professor could appear, depending on the source and seniority grades, at 17,000 lei or over 25,000 lei. The difference translated directly into food, housing, clothes, children’s education, and access to comfortable urban life.

Ioan Scurtu notes that the highest salaries were recorded in modern enterprises, with high productivity, as well as where the work was harder. He also shows that women and children were generally paid less than men for the same work; his examples come from Brașov in 1922, from the Antal printing house and the First Candy Factory.

Agricultural workers and day wages

At the base of the salary pyramid were many agricultural workers, paid by the day or by the job. For the year 1938, official data reproduced in the Radio România Actualități material indicate daily wages for men between 36 and 43 lei and for children between 19 and 29 lei. A day with a cart was paid between 123 and 128 lei, a day with a plough between 159 and 182 lei, while ploughing one hectare was paid between 375 and 383 lei. The same source warns that these were prices set by the ministry, while actual payments could be lower.

Here one can see the rupture between the urban Romania of ministries and the rural Romania of seasonal labor. The day laborer’s wage depended on the season, region, local agreement, harvest, and the balance of power between owner and worker. The civil servant’s monthly salary brought predictability; day wages brought calendar, weather, mud, and negotiation.

What money was worth in the daily basket

Salaries gain meaning when prices appear. In 1934, in Bucharest, average selling prices indicated 17.50 lei for 1 kg of first-quality beef, 28.40 lei for 1 kg of pork, 8.25 lei for 1 liter of milk, 65.10 lei for 1 kg of fresh butter, 7.75 lei for 1 kg of white bread, 5.55 lei for 1 kg of black bread, 3.10 lei for 1 kg of potatoes, 25.75 lei for 1 liter of sunflower oil, 530 lei for a pair of men’s shoes, and 712 lei for 1,000 kg of beech firewood.

If we place side by side, indicatively, the unskilled salary indicated for 1938 and the Bucharest prices from 1934, the sum seems generous in kilograms of bread; the comparison remains approximate, however, because the salary and the prices come from different years. Life required rent, heating, clothes, transport, illness, children, and small emergencies that have the bad habit of appearing exactly before payday.

What these salaries would mean in Romania in 2026

Any attempt to transform the interwar leu into today’s leu must be treated with a healthy dose of caution. The leu of 1934 or 1938 lived in an economy with different prices, different taxes, different rents, different consumption, a different household structure, and a labor market in which job security was sometimes worth half the salary. A loaf of bread, a pair of shoes, or a ton of firewood says something about purchasing power, but it cannot perfectly reconstruct a month of interwar life, with rent, stove, children, clothes, doctor, and perhaps a coffee drunk with a certain accounting concern.

Still, in order to better sense the proportions, one can make an indicative social equivalence. For the year 2026, a useful reference point is the average net salary in the economy, which reached 5,938 lei in March 2026, according to the National Institute of Statistics. The net minimum wage is around 2,574 lei until July 1, 2026, and from July 1, 2026, rises to approximately 2,699 lei net, according to the Ministry of Labor’s communication regarding the increase of the gross minimum wage to 4,325 lei.

For the comparison below, the interwar unskilled worker’s salary from 1938, indicated at 1,457 lei, can be taken as the lower benchmark of the wage market. If we associate it indicatively with the current net minimum wage, then each interwar salary can be read as a multiple of this minimum level. The result is not a perfect monetary conversion, but a social translation: roughly where that person would have stood in today’s income hierarchy.

 | Position / category in the text | Interwar salary mentioned | Ratio compared with the unskilled wage earner in 1938, 1,457 lei | Indicative 2026 equivalent, based on net minimum wage of 2,699 lei | Unskilled wage earner | 1,457 lei | 1.0x | approx. 2,700 lei net
| Wage earner in the art and precision industry | 1,600 lei | 1.1x | approx. 3,000 lei net
| Construction worker, 1938 average | 1,752 lei | 1.2x | approx. 3,250 lei net
| Worker in metallurgy and mechanics | 1,799 lei | 1.23x | approx. 3,330 lei net
| Worker in the textile industry | 1,904 lei | 1.31x | approx. 3,530 lei net
| Transport and storage | 2,000 lei | 1.37x | approx. 3,700 lei net
| Food industry | 2,118 lei | 1.45x | approx. 3,930 lei net
| Extractive industry | 2,361 lei | 1.62x | approx. 4,370 lei net
| Unskilled laborer | 2,700 lei | 1.85x | approx. 5,000 lei net
| Postal worker | 2,700–3,760 lei | 1.85–2.58x | approx. 5,000–6,960 lei net
| Police sergeant | 2,510–3,120 lei | 1.72–2.14x | approx. 4,650–5,780 lei net
| Mining foreman | 3,120–4,100 lei | 2.14–2.81x | approx. 5,780–7,590 lei net
| Postal clerk | 5,950–7,360 lei | 4.08–5.05x | approx. 11,000–13,640 lei net
| Police commissioner | 5,920 lei | 4.06x | approx. 10,960 lei net
| Tenured secondary school teacher | 8,990 lei | 6.17x | approx. 16,650 lei net
| County school inspector | 10,500 lei | 7.21x | approx. 19,450 lei net
| County senior physician | 12,000 lei | 8.24x | approx. 22,240 lei net
| University professor | 17,000 lei | 11.67x | approx. 31,500 lei net
| Chief physician of the Capital | 18,000 lei | 12.35x | approx. 33,330 lei net
| Postal director | 19,500 lei | 13.38x | approx. 36,100 lei net
| University professor with seniority grades, 1934–1935 | 25,350–29,550 lei | 17.4–20.28x | approx. 46,970–54,730 lei net
| Minister, 1934–1935 register | 30,400 lei | 20.86x | approx. 56,300 lei net
| Patriarch, 1934–1935 register | 31,550 lei | 21.65x | approx. 58,430 lei net
| President of the Council of Ministers, Ioan Scurtu data set | 60,000 lei | 41.18x | approx. 111,150 lei net

The table shows that interwar Romania had a steep salary hierarchy. A construction or metallurgy worker would fall, through this indicative equivalence, into the area of low to modest salaries today. A postal worker or police sergeant would enter an area close to the current average net salary or slightly above it. A tenured secondary school teacher, by contrast, would reach a social equivalent of over 16,000 lei net in 2026, which explains why the interwar teacher with seniority and status was a respected figure, with a material position hard to confuse with precarity.

The university professor stood even higher. If we use the figure of 17,000 lei from the data set cited by Ioan Scurtu, the social equivalent jumps above 30,000 lei net in 2026 money. If we use the 1934–1935 budgetary register, where a university professor with six seniority grades appears with between 25,350 and 29,550 lei, we arrive at a zone of approximately 47,000–55,000 lei net in current social equivalent. Here one can see very clearly the old world of academic prestige: the university chair offered not only symbolic respect, but also a material position in the very upper part of society.

At the top of the pyramid, the comparisons become almost indecent. A minister from the 1934–1935 register, with 30,400 lei, would socially equate to over 56,000 lei net in 2026. The President of the Council of Ministers, in Ioan Scurtu’s data set, reaches an equivalence of over 111,000 lei net per month. Such an amount should not be read as a literal current salary, but as an indicator of social distance: the gap between the top of the state and the base of wage labor was very large, and the interwar state rewarded its administrative elite with a generosity that today would generate plenty of evening TV shows, with red charts and angry guests.

There is, however, another useful method of reading: comparison with the current average net salary, not only with the minimum wage. In March 2026, the average net salary was 5,938 lei, according to INS. Through this lens, the well-positioned postal worker, the police sergeant near the upper end of the scale, or the mining foreman come close to the current average area. The tenured high school teacher exceeds the current average net salary by almost three times, while the university professor enters an income zone that today we would associate with senior management, very well-paid liberal professions, or the upper corporate tier.

The comparison with prices completes the picture. In 1934, in Bucharest, a pair of men’s shoes cost 530 lei, while 1 kg of white bread cost 7.75 lei, according to the data reproduced in the Radio România Actualități material. For an unskilled wage earner with 1,457 lei, the shoes represented more than a third of the monthly salary. For a tenured secondary school teacher with 8,990 lei, the same pair of shoes was a manageable expense, almost a footnote in the budget. For a minister or a university professor with seniority grades, shoes fell into the category of small domestic irritations, not financial dramas.

Thus, when we read interwar salaries, the real stake lies not only in the number of lei, but in the distance between people. The interwar period had university professors paid like genuine elites, high school teachers with a very solid material status, mid-level civil servants who lived decently, and workers who counted money carefully. At the bottom, agricultural day laborers and unskilled wage earners felt the economy in its most direct form: bread, firewood, rent, clothes, illness, and tomorrow. At the top, salary was already becoming a social passport.

How salaries were set

In the public sector, salaries were set through the budget, statutes, grids, classes, and seniority grades. Positions appeared in the general state budget, with salary limits, and professional grades mattered enormously. A university professor with six seniority grades had a different salary position from a beginner; the same principle appears among primary teachers, military personnel, engineers, judges, or administrative officials.

The Statute of Civil Servants regulated admission, advancement, stability, and discipline. ANFP shows that the law and its implementing regulation governed the administrative hierarchy, the conditions for appointment, admission, advancement, transfer, and disciplinary sanctions. The civil servant thus entered a universe of steps, files, and signatures, where salary increased through rank, class, and seniority grade.

In the private sector and in manual labor, salary levels depended on the sector, qualification, productivity, difficulty of the work, and the relationship between employer and worker. In the first years after the war, Ioan Scurtu notes that supplements for rent, clothing, cost of living, travel, and child allowances were added to basic salaries, a sign that the simple salary needed crutches in an economy made more expensive.

A social hierarchy written in lei

Seen from top to bottom, the interwar salary scale looked like this: at the top stood dignitaries, the patriarch, senior magistrates, generals, and ministers, with tens of thousands of lei per month, depending on the year and the grid. They were followed by university professors, diplomats, judges, important physicians, prefects, colonels, and directors in strategic institutions. In the middle stood high school teachers, primary teachers with seniority grades, commissioners, trainee lawyers, postal clerks, locomotive mechanics, technicians, and mid-ranking civil servants. Lower down came postal workers, sergeants, ushers, poorly graded drivers, foremen, unskilled laborers, and wage earners in poorly paid sectors. At the most fragile base were agricultural day laborers, child workers, and women paid less in many enterprises.

Interwar Romania often appears in a nostalgic light, with boulevards, cafés, elegant advertisements, and well-behaved trams. Salaries add a sharper contrast to reality. For an educated minority connected to the state or to prestigious professions, Romania of the 1930s offered excellent incomes and status. For many workers, wages meant carefully calculated survival. For agricultural day laborers, payment came at the end of a day in which grand history mattered very little, while the weather mattered enormously.

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