On 3 August 2026 the Registry Agency brought the Personal Insolvency Register into operation. This was the missing technical step: the Law on Insolvency of Natural Persons was promulgated back in State Gazette No. 54 of 4 July 2025, but no application to open proceedings could be filed until the register went live. As of 3 August, they can be.
For the property market this is not abstract news. There is now a new public register worth checking before a transaction — and a new set of rules affecting both debtors who own a home and the buyers across the table from them.
The register is the Registry Agency's first fully automated information system: acts and circumstances are recorded and published automatically, without an official's involvement. Each debtor gets a single electronic file.
Access is through the agency's unified portal for electronic administrative services. Public searches are free and open to anyone. Certificates, written searches and certified copies carry state fees ranging from €5.62 to €10.23 (indicative, as at August 2026). Recording and publishing acts is done by the trustees in bankruptcy.
The conditions are narrow and worth knowing precisely:
The law does not cover obligations arising from activity as a sole trader, a craft or a liberal profession — those follow a different route. Public liabilities to the revenue authority are likewise not discharged in these proceedings.
The most practical consequence: once proceedings are opened, the debtor cannot dispose of their property without the trustee's permission. A transaction concluded in breach of that restriction is void — and the debtor is treated as acting in bad faith, which collapses their own case.
For a buyer, this adds one new item to pre-deal due diligence. An encumbrance certificate from the Property Register shows mortgages, attachments and registered claims, but it does not show whether insolvency proceedings have been opened against the seller. That search is now made separately, in the new register — free of charge and publicly.
There is a flip side that helps debtors: opening the proceedings stays enforcement action against assets forming part of the insolvency estate, and no new monetary claims can be brought against the debtor.
This is the most common misconception. Personal bankruptcy does not wipe out a mortgage. The law expressly ranks claims secured by mortgage or pledge first, satisfied from the proceeds of realising the security itself. The creditor retains its rights under the security even while participating in the proceedings.
A repayment plan may provide for deferral or rescheduling of up to three years, partial or full forgiveness, and transactions involving the debtor's assets. But it is adopted by the meeting of creditors and confirmed by the court — it cannot be imposed unilaterally.
Here the law is particularly unforgiving. A debtor is deemed to be in bad faith — and therefore loses access to the procedure — if, within defined look-back periods before the application, they have:
The practical conclusion is clear: gifting the apartment to a child, or selling it to a relative "before things get difficult", protects nothing. It closes the door to the procedure — permanently, since the application can be made only once.
A search in the new register is now part of the standard checks we run on every transaction, alongside the encumbrance certificate, the cadastral sketch and the tax valuation. It is public and quick, but easy to miss, because it is new and appears in none of the documents used until now.
The full scope of pre-signature checks is set out in a separate guide: Legal checks before buying a property.
Personal bankruptcy is now a real procedure, but with a narrow entrance: debts above roughly €6,200, more than 12 months of insolvency, a single lifetime attempt, and a long list of bad-faith grounds, most of them revolving around disposals of property. For buyers, a new free public search has appeared that is worth running before every transaction.
If a purchase or sale is coming up and there is any doubt about the other side's liabilities — call us or come by the office. We will run the checks together and tell you plainly what is in order and what needs settling before the notary.
