Lebanon submits 2026 budget on time, spotlighting years of fiscal delays

Report by Nada Andraos, English adaptation by Mariella Succar

In a state governed by law, the general budget is meant to serve as the cornerstone of fiscal discipline and economic stability.

Yet Lebanon’s experience since the 1990s tells a very different story. The approval of the state budget has become the exception rather than a binding constitutional rule.

Under Article 83 of the Lebanese Constitution, the government is required to submit the draft budget to Parliament before the opening of the ordinary session on the first Tuesday after October 15, with the budget law to be approved before the end of January of the fiscal year. In practice, this provision has remained largely unenforced.

From the early 1990s through 2002, the budget was approved within constitutional deadlines only six times. In several cases — including the budgets for 1997, 1999 and 2001 — approval came months after the fiscal year had already begun. Other budgets between 1990 and 2005 were passed midway through the year or even toward its end.

The situation worsened after 2005. Between 2006 and 2016, no budget law was approved at all. For a full decade, the state operated under the provisional “one-twelfth rule,” a precedent that weakened parliamentary oversight and opened the door to spending outside proper legal frameworks.

Following the end of a two-and-a-half-year presidential vacuum in 2016, public finance briefly returned to a degree of regularity, though not consistently across all subsequent years.

After 2017, budgets were once again approved, but mostly outside constitutional deadlines.

A notable development has now emerged. The government completed the draft 2026 budget within the constitutional timeframe and submitted it on October 2, before the opening of Parliament’s ordinary session. 

The proposal is now before lawmakers, who have until the end of January to approve it in line with constitutional requirements.

The question now facing Parliament is whether it will adhere to those deadlines and break with a long-standing pattern of exceptional spending — or revert once again to the one-twelfth rule, where constitutional compliance remains the exception rather than the norm.

The issue encapsulates Lebanon’s broader crisis of fiscal governance.