As being the most debated polygenic disease, rheumatoid arthritis elicits great interest in the study of association with genetic factors in various ethnic and racial groups. Some of the HLA-DRB1 alleles are encoding shared epitope amino acids that are not conferring the same risk in various populations. Our study focuses on the evaluation of the distribution of HLA-DRB1 alleles in Romanian patients with early rheumatoid arthritis, along with controls by using PCRSSP method. HLA-DRB1 allele genotyping showed statistically significant differences given by a higher allele frequency for *04, *01 and *14. Also, in our study was observed a lower frequency for *03,*11,*13 and *15 HLA-DRB1 allele in patients group compared with controls, also a high frequency for *0404 and *0408 allele, in contrast with *0401 and *0402 which were significantly lower in patients than in controls. *0403, *0405 and *10 were not associated with early rheumatoid arthritis in our group diagnosed according with new classification criteria ACR/EULAR 2010. In present study we found a negative association of *0402, *11 and *13 with early rheumatoid arthritis. Results of our study are demonstrating the need of a continuous work of allele tracing and associating with rheumatoid arthritis, especially in cases early diagnosed in order to create sufficient premises for instituting a correct and possibly long term remissive treatment.