State Budget 2025: what changes were made for the first reading and how much will be spent on defense
Kyiv • UNN
The Verkhovna Rada has adopted in the first reading the draft state budget for 2025 with expenditures of over UAH 3.6 trillion. Security and defense remain the top priority with funding of UAH 2.2 trillion.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal has outlined the priorities of the State Budget for 2025 after it was adopted by the parliament in the first reading. MPs also reported changes to the first reading, UNN reports.
Details
"The priority of the next year's budget will also be security and defense. All taxes paid by people and businesses will be used to strengthen our defenders and military capabilities. Thus, we will allocate over UAH 2.2 trillion for these needs, which is about 26% of GDP. This is UAH 46 billion more than in 2024," Shmyhal wrote on Telegram.
The Prime Minister also listed several other key milestones of the country's main budget for the next year:
- In total, state budget expenditures are planned to amount to over UAH 3.6 trillion, which is UAH 535 billion more than this year.
- General fund revenues are planned at UAH 2.7 billion, which is UAH 411 billion more than this year.
"I am grateful to the MPs for their support and we expect the state budget to be adopted as a whole as soon as possible," Shmyhal said.
Addendum
On October 28, the Budget Committee recommended the Budget 2025 and the draft Budget Conclusions for the first reading. As noted by the Committee's Chairperson, MP Roksolana Pidlasa, the key changes that the Committee proposed to the government to make to the draft state budge
- all sources of filling the Road Fund (UAH 43.2 billion next year) should be directed to the general budget fund - for the priority needs, first of all, the needs of national security and defense;
- at least UAH 2 billion should be allocated for humanitarian demining;
- exclude the proposal to transfer bank accounts of hospitals to the Treasury;
- From April 1, 2025, the Verkhovna Rada apparatus will switch to a graded remuneration system;
- the so-called “Chornobyl pension” / supplemental payment to non-working pensioners in the resettlement zone / will be paid only to those who actually lived in the exclusion zone from 1986 to 1993 (the cost of paying pensions to new “settlers” is about UAH 15 billion);
- to reconsider the idea of introducing bonuses for local court judges in 2025 and to revise the expenditures for their support accordingly;
- consider allocating funding (UAH 4.8 billion) for new passenger railcars;
- consider allocating 4% of personal income tax to the budgets of the ATCs and at the same time abandoning the subvention from the state budget to the regional budgets to compensate for the difference in utility tariffs;
- decide on the feasibility of transferring reverse payments from local government budgets to the state budget, i.e., leaving UAH 12.9 billion to local government budgets.
As noted by MP Halyna Yanchenko, the 2025 Budget approved in the first reading also includes an amendment on "additional UAH 2.5 billion for loans to Ukrainian defense producers."
At the same time, MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak pointed outthat "not a single amendment was changed except for the amendment on prosecutors' salaries".
