Minfin keeps a weekly table of the legal acts needed to implement the 2026 budget law. The issue dated 4 September lists 62 of them, and 58 have been issued. The four that have not been issued are all about raising someone's pay. Two are simply late. The other two were taken off the schedule under instructions from the Government Staff — and one is the decree that would raise the pay of Russia's servicemen, struck out on 27 August, four days before its deadline.

The table

The document is called “Results of monitoring the legal acts required to implement the Federal Law ‘On the federal budget for 2026 and the planning period 2027 and 2028’”, and Minfin publishes it as a spreadsheet. This is the issue as of 4 September.

Every row is one draft act, and the columns record its progress: the ministry responsible, the deadline set in the plan-schedule, the letter sending the draft to Minfin, Minfin's reply, the justice ministry's legal and anti-corruption review, the letter submitting the draft to the Government, and finally the date and number of the act once it exists. Fifty-eight of the 62 rows end with a date and a number. A companion file carries ten further entries, all of them issued.

Four rows end with a dash.

The four

All four deadlines have passed. But the rows do not say the same thing.

Work on row 55 is under way: the draft went to the Government on 5 August under letter No. 14-5/10/P-5998, and that letter first appears in the 4 September issue — the cell was still empty a week earlier. The draft in row 53 has not moved at all: every progress cell is blank, so the table records no step at all — not even the draft going to Minfin for sign-off.

Rows 36 and 57 contain something else. In row 57, the cell where the letter submitting the draft to the Government should appear instead reads:

“No. DG-P4-32155 of 27.08.2026 Excluded from the schedule”

A footnote gives the instruction in full:

“Instruction of the Deputy Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation — Head of the Government Staff D.Yu. Grigorenko of 27 August 2026 No. DG-P4-32155.”

Row 36 was removed the same way six weeks earlier, by instruction No. DG-P4-26434 of 15 July 2026, signed by the same official.

The week it happened

The table is published weekly, so the change can be dated from the file series itself. In the issue as of 21 August row 57 is an ordinary line: still in the schedule, deadline 1 September, every movement cell empty. In the issue as of 28 August the exclusion is already there. The instruction is dated 27 August, and it entered the table within the week.

The same pair of files answers the obvious objection — that four blanks might just be a table nobody updates. Between 28 August and 4 September two other rows were recorded as complete: № 38 with order No. 1914-r of 21 July, № 39 with decree No. 970 of 3 August, both transport acts on the railway. That is how six blanks became four. The table is being maintained; these four are its open entries.

What the act would have said

The series it belongs to is short and public. The official publication portal holds seven acts with this exact title — 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2025 — and none for 2026. The most recent is decree No. 464 of 9 April 2025, whose first paragraph sets out what this kind of act does:

“To raise, from 1 October 2025, by a factor of 1.045: the rates of pay for military positions and for military ranks of servicemen serving under contract; the rates of pay for military positions of servicemen serving by conscription; the salaries and the rates of pay for special ranks of persons serving in the National Guard troops of the Russian Federation and holding police special ranks, of employees of the internal affairs bodies of the Russian Federation, of the institutions and bodies of the penal system of the Russian Federation, of the enforcement bodies of the Russian Federation, of the federal fire service of the State Fire Service, of the customs bodies of the Russian Federation and of the commanding personnel of the federal courier service.”

A factor of 1.045 is a rise of 4.5%, and it reaches well beyond the army: the National Guard, the police, the prison service, the bailiffs, the fire service, customs. The decree's next paragraph rounds every resulting figure up to the whole rouble.

Row 53 has a 2025 counterpart too, and its date is a coincidence worth noting. Decree No. 1371 of 4 September 2025 raised the same salaries “from 1 October 2025, by a factor of 1.076” — a rise of 7.6%. It was published on 5 September 2025, a year ago today. This year the equivalent row has not moved at all.

Why a missing decree is a budget instrument

Each of those seven acts is a separate government decree, made once, naming its own multiplier and its own starting date. The rates of pay are what the decree changes; while no decree is made, they stay where they are. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why nothing has to be publicly cancelled for a rise not to happen.

It also explains why this table matters more than its dull title suggests. A rise that is never announced leaves no trace: there is no repeal to report and no debate to cover. The plan-schedule is the one place where the decision becomes a document — first as a line with a deadline, then as a line with a dash and an instruction number.

We have made the opposite point about a decree that did exist: in July the government lowered the permitted quality of petrol by an act nobody could read, because it was never posted to the portal. Here the act is not hidden. It has been removed from the list of things to write.

What this changes in our model

Nothing today. None of our eight indicators reads federal wage spending, and this one act carries no sum in the table.

Indirectly, it touches the federal deficit, which scores 65 out of 100 — a twelve-month rolling deficit of 3.3% of GDP through July. Pay that is not raised is spending that does not happen, and spending below plan narrows the deficit. This is the uncomfortable result our model produces from time to time: the indicator moves the way we call “better” precisely because someone was not paid more. We noted the same pattern on 3 September, when the central bank tied faster corporate lending to slower budget spending.

Consumer prices score 96, at 6.0% a year. That is a yardstick here rather than a channel: a salary left unindexed for a year loses roughly that much purchasing power. Today's other movement, the money supply, runs on its own track and is unaffected. The strength index stands at 47.

What we do not know

The table does not say why. Neither instruction is published — the Government Staff does not post them — so the reason for both exclusions is unavailable, and three quite different things are indistinguishable from the outside: the rise cancelled; the rise postponed to a later year; or the rise moved to another instrument, a presidential decree or a ministerial act, which would make a government decree unnecessary.

The series itself argues for caution. There is no act of this title for 2018 or for 2024, so the instrument is not used every year and its absence alone proves nothing. But 2026 supplies a separate fact: this act was in the schedule, with a deadline, and it was taken out four days before that deadline.

Beyond that: the table contains no sums, so what an indexation would have cost in 2026 cannot be read from it. We did not read the 2026 budget law itself, so whether that law requires the rise is not established here. The plan-schedule the table monitors is not published alongside it, only the results of monitoring it. And row 53's empty cells are genuinely ambiguous — they may record a ministry that has done nothing, or a step Minfin has not yet entered.