Russian regions ended 2025 with a total deficit of 1.538 trillion rubles in local budgets, reported the Russian Ministry of Finance.
Compared to the previous year, the deficit in regional budgets increased by 5 times, and compared to 2023, it increased by almost 8 times, with its total size becoming unprecedented in the last 20 years of available statistics. The previous record for the regions was set during the pandemic crisis (677 billion rubles in 2020), but this time it was exceeded by half.
At the end of the year, the receipts of the key profit tax in the regions decreased by 8.5%, to 5.278 trillion rubles, while total revenues increased by only 4.8% to 25.87 trillion rubles. At the same time, expenses increased by 10% to 27.408 trillion rubles.
“The picture is very grim,” notes economist Natalia Zubarevich. Detailed data are currently available for the first nine months of last year, and they show that 52 regions had a budget deficit. “The most difficult situation is in the Kemerovo and Vologda regions, where the deficit is 25% (of own revenues – TMT), in the Arkhangelsk, Murmansk, and Tyumen regions (20-22%), and in the Irkutsk and Komi regions (17-18%),” Zubarevich lists.
It is significant that the increase in the deficit of regional budgets occurred amid an increase in the tax burden, which “should support the revenue base of the budget in a broad sense,” notes Natalia Orlova, chief economist at Alfa-Bank (The Moscow Times).
