Budget FY2026-27: The Analysis

The FY2026-27 budget is a ৳938,000 crore bet that the revenue system can do something it has never done. The spending plan is openly expansionary, the priorities are legible in the allocation shares, and the revenue line is the single thread the whole fabric hangs from. This is the full read: five findings, every figure verified against the Ministry of Finance documents in the BDPolicyLab data lake and reproducible from the methodology page.

The revenue wall

The budget targets ৳695,000 crore in revenue, 23.2% above the FY2025-26 target of ৳564,000 crore. Targets are declarations; collections are constraints. The last completed fiscal year on record, FY2023-24, produced ৳409,812 crore. Reaching the new target from that base requires 19.3% revenue growth every year for three consecutive years, while nominal GDP over the same window grows 10.9% a year. The tax system must outrun the economy by roughly 8.4 percentage points a year, indefinitely, for the budget's own numbers to hold. Nothing in the recent record supports that pace.

The recent record points the other way. The FY2024-25 revenue budget was cut 4.3% at revision. The tax line now asked to deliver ৳629,000 crore collected ৳369,776 crore as recently as FY2023-24, and NBR's entire FY2023-24 take was ৳361,452 crore. The wall is not an abstraction; it is three consecutive years of collections growing faster than they ever have, starting immediately.

The deficit arithmetic

Strip the budget to its skeleton. Non-ADP expenditure comes to ৳638,000 crore. The revenue target covers it with ৳57,000 crore to spare, which means roughly ৳243,000 crore of the ৳300,000 crore Annual Development Programme is financed by borrowing and grants. The printed deficit of ৳236,850 crore is the grants-inclusive figure; expenditure minus revenue alone leaves ৳6,150 crore for grants to bridge. The structure is plain: the running state pays for itself only if the revenue wall holds, and the entire development effort rides on credit.

A larger state, on paper

Total outlay rises 18.7%, from ৳790,000 crore budgeted in FY2025-26 to ৳938,000 crore, against implied nominal GDP growth of 9.4%. Public expenditure moves from 12.7% of GDP to 13.7%. That is a deliberate expansion of the state, and it is more honest to call it that than a continuation budget.

The development line carries the ambition. The ADP was actually spent at ৳195,234 crore in FY2023-24, revised to ৳216,000 crore in FY2024-25, budgeted at ৳230,000 crore in FY2025-26, and now jumps to ৳300,000 crore: 30.4% above last year's budget and more than one and a half times anything the system has actually executed in this four-year frame.

The silent claim

Before any new commitment is funded, interest claims its share: budgeted at ৳122,000 crore for FY2025-26, equal to 21.6% of that year's revenue target, and already ৳114,590 crore in actual FY2023-24 payments. About 22 taka of every 100 taka the state collects is spoken for before a school, a hospital bed, or a kilometre of road enters the ledger. Every deficit-financed taka in this budget compounds that claim for the budgets that follow.

Priorities, measured properly

In an expanding budget every ministry can receive more taka while losing priority. Shares of the budget, not levels, are the honest measure. On that measure the winners of FY2026-27 are health, social welfare, and education:

• Health Services Division: +1.64 percentage points, to 3.26% of allocations
• Ministry of Social Welfare: +1.02 percentage points, to 2.01% of allocations
• Ministry of Primary and Mass Education: +0.75 percentage points, to 3.08% of allocations
• Secondary and Higher Education Division: +0.7 percentage points, to 3.78% of allocations
• Planning Division: +0.67 percentage points, to 2.39% of allocations

And the losers:

• Finance Division: -4.2 percentage points, to 54.81%
• Local Government Division: -0.6 percentage points, to 2.66%
• Ministry of Water Resources: -0.29 percentage points, to 0.7%

The social-sector gains are real and still small. Even after gaining share, education spending stands at 1.79% of GDP against the 4.0% Incheon benchmark, and health at 0.92% against the 5.0% threshold associated with universal health coverage. Social protection runs at 0.84% of GDP against a 2.0% floor, and agriculture takes 6.83% of the budget against the Maputo commitment of 10.0% of public expenditure. The reallocation moves in the right direction at a pace that leaves the gaps measured in decades, not budgets. The full benchmark table, with each target on its stated basis, is on the SDG gap page.

The revision season is the real budget

Budgets in this series are revised down, not up. The FY2024-25 cycle cut expenditure 6.6% and revenue 4.3% at revision, and the cut was not spread evenly: the development programme absorbed it, with the ADP marked down 18.5%. Interest was not cut. Salaries were not cut. Development was.

Read the FY2026-27 totals as a ceiling, not a forecast. The revised budget expected in February-March 2027 is where intent meets capacity, and if the pattern repeats, the ambitious ADP above is the first casualty. That is also why the revenue wall matters beyond accounting: it decides whether the expansion this budget promises is delivered in schools and embankments or surrendered in a February press release.

The promise ledger

The budget speech makes 53 concrete, citizen-facing commitments. The largest single one is the Family Card expansion: a monthly allowance of ৳2,500 paid directly to 4.1 million women with a ৳14,500 crore allocation, roughly three times existing safety-net rates (speech, PDF pp. 70-71). At the other end of the ledger sits a zero tax rate on solar power until 2035. Between those poles are 51 more commitments on food security, education stipends, migrant workers, and tax relief.

BDPolicyLab has opened a tracker for every one of them, each cited to its page in the speech, at the measure tracker. Status updates follow implementation evidence through the fiscal year. The first full checkpoint is the revised budget; the running checkpoints are monthly NBR collections against the run-rate Finding 1 implies, and IMED's ADP implementation reports.

The numbers behind every paragraph above are on the analysis page. The Bangla essay version of this piece is নয় লাখ আটত্রিশ হাজার কোটি টাকার প্রশ্ন.