Welcome to page “Budget” of the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Bulgaria.

Public finances are a system aimed at providing and financing public goods and services, redistributing and transferring income and accumulating resources from budget organisations through revenues, grants and donations, realisation of financial assets and undertaking of debt. The public finance management policy is directly related to maintaining macroeconomic stability and ensuring financing of the government policies and priorities reflected in the drawing up of the medium-term budget forecast, the preparation of the state budget of the Republic of Bulgaria and the ensuring of its ongoing implementation.

Here you can get acquainted with the budgetary process and the main budgetary documents – the medium-term budget forecast for the respective period, the law on the state budget of the Republic of Bulgaria for the respective year and its accompanying documents, the budgetary methodology and statistics, the budget and the report of the Ministry of Finance, and other information.

Here you can find the basic law regulating the budgetary process as well as the budgetary framework and the general structure of public finance – the Public Finance Law.

Bulgaria maintains its score for budgetary transparency in the eighth survey of the International Budget Partnership – 2021 Open Budget Survey.

On 31 May 2022, the 2021 Open Budget Survey of the International Budget Partnership published its results. Bulgaria has maintained its score for budgetary transparency in the survey at 71 points, thus keeping its position in the second group of countries in the index with a score between 60 and 80 points (out of 100 in total), which are considered to provide “significant information” on the budget.

The Open Budget Index is the only international independent comparative survey on budgetary transparency that assesses the extent to which the governments of 120 countries around the world provide the public with timely and detailed budget information. The Index covers the procedures for preparation, adoption, implementation and reporting of the budget, as well as the responsibilities of other institutions such as the National Audit Office and the legislative authority in the budgetary process.

Bulgaria has been participating in the Open Budget Survey since 2006, when its score was 47 points. Over the following years, steps were taken to increase transparency and our country registered a significant improvement in its score, which reached 71 points in the 2019 Index, and kept this level in the last 2021 Survey.

Overall, the government in Bulgaria provides a significant amount of information through the eight types of key budgetary documents that are subject to this assessment. It should be borne in mind that the latest survey covers data for the period up to the end of 2020, during which restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic were in place, which prevented the regular conducting of the stages of the budgetary procedure and the timely preparation and publication of certain budgetary documents. However, the results of the survey show a significant improvement in the quality and content of the information included in the budgetary documents.

The current score is an estimate of the efforts of the government, and in particular the Ministry of Finance, to increase transparency and to provide more information in budgetary documents on public finance management, as well as to ensure easy access to them in a form understandable to the general public through newsletters, infographics, brochures, etc.

The Ministry of Finance continuously strives to achieve the target for the key indicator “Open Budget Ranking of Bulgaria by the International Budget Partnership” set in its strategic documents; the transparency ranking should not be lower than the score reached in the last survey, with an upward trend.

For more information, read here.