Every autumn, governments across Europe present their budget for the following year. Parliaments debate it, unions react to it, and opposition parties denounce it. Most citizens ignore it entirely.
How to read a government budget in 5 steps
That is understandable. Budget documents are long, the figures run into billions, and the official language tends to bury the political substance under layers of technical jargon. But a budget is not primarily a financial document. It is a political one. It answers one question: who gets what? And that question belongs to everyone.
Here are five steps to read one, using examples from the countries in this project.
Step 1 – Start with the budget speech, not the budget
When a finance minister presents the budget to parliament, they give a speech. That speech is public, usually short, and written to be understood. It sets out the government’s stated priorities for the year and gives you the overall numbers before you have to look at a single table.
In France, the projet de loi de finances is presented to the Assemblée nationale each September. In Poland, the ustawa budżetowa goes to the Sejm in the same period. In both cases, the finance ministry publishes a summary document alongside the full text. Start there. The full budget will still be there when you need it.
Where to look: the websites of national ministries of finance, or the budget monitoring pages of each country’s parliament.
Step 2 – Find the three key figures
Before reading anything else, locate three numbers:
Total revenue – what the government expects to collect, mostly through taxes and social contributions.
Total expenditure – what it plans to spend.
The balance – the difference. A deficit means the government is borrowing to cover the gap; a surplus means it is collecting more than it spends.
These three numbers frame everything else. According to Eurostat, in 2023 Romania ran a deficit of around 6.5% of GDP, one of the highest in the EU, while Norway, which is not an EU member but publishes comparable data, recorded a large surplus driven by its sovereign wealth fund. Same continent, very different fiscal positions, and very different political contexts behind each.
Step 3 – Follow the expenditure
Governments divide spending into categories: social protection, health, education, defence, public debt repayment, infrastructure, and so on. The share of total expenditure allocated to each category is where the politics become visible.
In Belgium, social protection consistently accounts for over 40% of public expenditure, reflecting a social model built around strong unemployment insurance and pension systems. When that share changes, even by a few percentage points, it has consequences for millions of people.
A simple and revealing exercise: take two consecutive budgets and compare the share going to each major category. An increase in one area and a decrease in another is a choice, not an inevitability. The numbers make that choice legible.
Useful resource: Eurostat’s Government Finance Statistics database publishes standardised expenditure breakdowns for all EU member states, which makes cross-country comparison straightforward.
Step 4 – Ask who pays, and how
Revenue is the less-discussed side of the budget, but it is just as political as expenditure. Governments raise money through income tax, corporate tax, VAT, excise duties, and social contributions. The balance between these sources is not neutral.
VAT applies the same rate to everyone. In practice, this means it takes a proportionally larger share of income from lower earners than from higher ones, a point that the European Parliament’s own research service has flagged repeatedly in its analyses of member states’ tax structures. Income tax, by contrast, is structured progressively in most European countries: the rate rises with income.
When a government raises additional revenue through VAT rather than through income tax, or reduces corporate tax rates while maintaining social contributions, those are distributional choices. They have winners and losers. The budget is where those choices are formally recorded.
Step 5 – Check what actually happened
Most people know that governments publish budgets. Fewer know that they also publish what actually happened. These documents, called budget execution reports, outturn statements, or rapports d’exécution in French — show whether spending targets were met, whether revenues came in as forecast, and where the gaps were.
Comparing the original budget with the outturn is often more instructive than reading either document alone. In France, the Cour des comptes, the independent public audit institution, publishes an annual assessment of budget execution that is notably candid about where government forecasts proved optimistic. Similar institutions exist in Poland (the Najwyższa Izba Kontroli) and Belgium (the Cour des comptes / Rekenhof).
When a government consistently underspends in a given area, that tells you something. When it consistently overspends, that tells you something different. The distance between plan and reality is a measure of how much weight to give the next budget’s promises.
A budget is an argument
Every budget reflects a set of choices about what a society should protect, what it can defer, and who should contribute. Those choices are contested, that is what politics is for. But you cannot contest what you cannot read.
The five steps above will not turn you into a public finance specialist. They will, however, give you enough to ask better questions, of politicians, of journalists, and of the numbers themselves.
The Civic Maths training module “Reading a Budget Like a Citizen” develops these ideas further with real data exercises and facilitated group activities. Available soon on the Teach page.