On 1 October the texts of Russia’s 2027–2029 budget package appeared. Until then we had the fact that it had been tabled — nine government orders published on pravo.gov.ru, which we read on 1 October — and press accounts of its parameters. Now there are bills. The State Duma registered the package at 23:12 on 30 September 2026 under numbers 615-9 to 621-9; the stamp is on the government’s covering letter No. ММ-П13-36741, signed by Mishustin, which we read on the first page of the budget bill itself.
The official portal sozd.duma.gov.ru has been unreachable from our environment for six days. The texts below come from storage.consultant.ru, which publishes the tabled PDFs — the bills with their explanatory notes and financial justifications, not a retelling. Every figure and every quotation in this article was read out of those files in this session.
One of them contains a sentence that has no precedent in the four budget rounds we have covered.
The exception, in the bill’s words
Part 23 of article 37 of bill No. 619-9, on the particulars of executing budgets in 2027:
“23. To establish that, in forming the draft federal law on the federal budget for 2027 and the planning period 2028 and 2029, the total volume of federal budget expenditure in 2027 may not exceed the sum of base oil and gas revenues, the projected volume of expenditure on servicing the state debt, and federal budget revenues less oil and gas revenues, the difference between funds received from the repayment of budget credits granted from the federal budget and the sum of budget credits granted from the federal budget, and also a calculated amount equal to 1500 billion roubles.”
Part 24 repeats the construction for 2028 with 500 billion roubles, and binds not only this budget bill but the one that will be written next year for 2028–2030.
Everything before the final clause is the budget rule’s formula: spending is tied to oil and gas revenue computed at a base price, plus what the state takes in from everything else. The last clause is not part of the formula. It is a fixed number added to the right-hand side — a quantity of spending that the rule does not generate, declared permissible by a separate law.
The rule has been suspended before — our guide to oil and gas revenues records its suspension in March and April 2026 — and this same bill suspends provisions of the Budget Code by the dozen, which is what the annual execution-particulars law is for. This is a different instrument. Nothing is suspended here: the formula stays, stays binding, and gains an extra term.
Why, according to the government
The explanatory note to the same bill, point 2.3, gives the reason:
“In the part concerning the gradual adaptation of budget commitments to the revised parameters of the base oil price, in forming the main characteristics of the federal budget for 2027 and 2028 provision is made for the possibility of the total volume of federal budget expenditure exceeding [the formula] … by a calculated amount equal to 1500 and 500 billion roubles respectively.”
The revised base oil price is in a different bill. Bill No. 616-9, amending the Budget Code, states the new norm in point 39 of its article 1:
“39) in point 4 of article 96⁶: a) to set out paragraph three in the following wording: ‘50 US dollars per barrel in 2027–2030.’; b) to recognise paragraphs four to six as having lost force.”
We reported the $50 price as a package parameter on 27 September and the government’s reason for it on 1 October. The bill text adds something neither piece could have. We re-read point 4 of article 96⁶ in its current wording this session, as amended by law No. 432-FZ of 28 November 2025: paragraph two sets $59 for 2026, paragraph three $58 for 2027, and paragraphs four, five and six set $57, $56 and $55 for 2028, 2029 and 2030. The bill replaces the 2027 step with a flat $50 for four years and deletes the three that follow. The descent of one dollar a year is gone.
What survives is paragraph seven, which the bill does not touch: the base price is indexed by 2% a year from 2031. The escalator therefore keeps running — from $50 instead of from the $55 the old schedule would have reached. The change is not a four-year adjustment. It lowers the floor that every later year is built on.
Against the 2027 step in current law, $50 is $8 lower. Base oil and gas revenues are what the rule permits the budget to spend; a lower base price produces fewer of them. The sequence the two bills describe, read together, is plain enough: the line that converts oil into permission to spend is moved down, and a fixed sum is then added back on top of it by name.
What the exception buys
Bill No. 615-9 is the budget itself. Its article 1 approves the 2027 figures on a forecast GDP of 248,323 billion roubles and inflation of no more than 4.0%:
“1) the projected total volume of federal budget revenues in the sum of 43,297,207,707.9 thousand roubles, including the projected volume of additional oil and gas revenues of the federal budget in the sum of 345,723,257.3 thousand roubles; 2) the total volume of federal budget expenditure in the sum of 48,740,443,433.7 thousand roubles”
In the units this site uses: revenue of 43,297.2 billion roubles, spending of 48,740.4 billion, and a deficit the law puts at 5,443,235,725.8 thousand roubles. Spending less revenue is 5,443.2 billion exactly — we recomputed each year, and all three match the stated deficits to the rouble. Against the GDP forecast in the same article, the gap is 2.19% of GDP in 2027, 1.94% in 2028 and 1.86% in 2029.
Two numbers are worth holding together. The 1,500 billion roubles of permitted excess is 27.6% of the 5,443.2 billion deficit the budget then plans. Rather more than a quarter of next year’s gap is not a consequence of the rule at all; it is the amount the rule was told not to count.
The additional oil and gas revenues — the money that flows into the fund in good months — are planned at 345.7 billion roubles for 2027, 379.9 billion for 2028 and 158.4 billion for 2029, against spending of nearly 49 trillion in the first of those years.
Financed by debt, and the fund is not mentioned
The ceiling on domestic state debt rises in three steps: 48,108.6 billion roubles at 1 January 2028, 54,985.7 billion at 1 January 2029 and 62,070.1 billion at 1 January 2030. That is 13,961 billion roubles of additional room over two years. The external ceiling moves the other way, from $66.4 billion to $60.9 billion.
Borrowing has two articles of its own. Article 13 approves the programme of domestic borrowing and article 14 the external one. Article 17 approves the sources of financing the deficit “in accordance with annex 35” — and annex 35 is not in the file.
The National Wealth Fund is not named anywhere in bill 615-9. We checked that across all 136 pages, including the two the text layer does not cover, which we read as images: the covering letter and the first page of article 1. The words “Фонд национального благосостояния”, and the abbreviation, appear zero times. The caveat belongs with the claim: annex 35, where the sources of deficit financing are listed, is not published with the text, so this is a fact about the operative articles of the law and not yet about the financing plan in full. What the articles do say is that borrowing is approved by name, in two of them, and the fund is not.
For our fund indicator the relevant quantity is the liquid part, which stands at $46.7 billion — a score of 29 of 100. A three-year plan that never names it is consistent with a fund the government does not expect to be able to draw on, and also with one it means to leave alone. The documents do not choose between those readings, and neither will we. Our guide to the fund sets out what the liquid part is and why only it can pay a bill.
The revenue side, priced for the first time
Our 27 September piece listed the tax measures in the package and ended: not one of them carried a rouble estimate in the ministry’s text. The financial-economic justification of bill No. 617-9, the Tax Code amendments, now prices them item by item. To the federal budget: more than 450 billion roubles a year “on a three-year horizon” from merging most personal income into one base with rates from 13% to 22%; 75 billion a year from 22% VAT on goods bought by individuals from third countries through e-commerce, with the marketplaces as tax agents from 2027; 4.5 billion from higher licensing duties. To the budget system as a whole: about 100 billion from making closed and interval mutual funds pay profit tax on passive income, and more than 80 billion a year from indexing excise above forecast inflation, of which more than 40 billion is federal.
Against these, the same document books losses. Extending the zero and 10% VAT rates on aviation to 1 January 2030 costs about 223 billion roubles. And one item runs directly against the series this package is built on:
“Excluding from the conditions for applying the ‘zero’ rate of the mineral extraction tax the restriction on a cumulative volume of natural gas production of 250 billion cubic metres will lead to lost revenues of the federal budget in the volume of around 30 billion roubles a year.”
A further 5 billion a year goes on extending a deduction under article 343.2. So the state is lowering the base price at which oil money becomes spendable, and in the same package giving up about 35 billion roubles a year of the oil and gas revenue that remains, to keep gas production going. The direction of substitution is visible without interpretation: more from wages, purchases and savings; less from extraction. Our guide to oil and gas revenues explains how that line is drawn each month.
One figure in that justification cannot be read. On the 35% profit tax on dividends paid into type “C” accounts, the document says the yield will be “in the volume of 150 130 billion roubles a year”, with a line break between the two numbers. Whether that means 150–130 billion, 150,130 billion, or a typing error, the text does not say, and we will not pick one.
Secret by the clause
The word “секретно” appears 38 times in bill 615-9, seven of them as “совершенно секретно”, top secret. Most mark annexes by number. Some mark the text itself: whole numbered provisions are published as the word alone — “57) (secret); 58) (top secret); 59) (top secret)” — and one run of parts reads “22. (Secret). 23. (Secret). 24. (Secret). 25. (Top secret).”
The effect is visible in the one defence-adjacent number the open text does carry. Part 1 of article 21 lists the reserved allocations the government may distribute in 2027 by amending the budget schedule; its seventh item is 153,797,244.4 thousand roubles — 153.8 billion — “and in the volume according to annexes 11 (secret), 14 (secret) and 16 (secret)”, for decisions of the President and the government on general government, national defence, national security, space, law enforcement and the development of the defence-industrial complex. The figure is 158.7 billion for 2028 and 168.0 billion for 2029. In each case the law states a sum and then adds an undisclosed one to it in the same sentence.
Part 9 of the same article goes further and describes a closed circuit. If, when the 2026 budget is executed, the actual volume of certain federal spending set out in annexes 38 and 39 (secret) to the 2026 budget law exceeds the actual revenue received under its annexes 40 and 41 (secret), then in 2027 the spending under annexes 36 and 37 (secret) to this bill, “for the same purposes”, is to be reduced by that excess — by amending the budget schedule, “without amendments to this Federal Law”. Secret spending is matched to secret revenue, reconciled across years, and corrected administratively. Every quantity in the sentence is withheld; only the rule connecting them is published.
The section-by-section breakdown of spending, including the National Defence chapter, is in those annexes and not in the 136 pages. Our guide to military spending carries the chapter at 17,147.4 billion roubles for 2027 from the finance ministry’s accompanying tables. Today’s primary confirms its denominators and not the figure itself: spending of 48,740.4 billion and GDP of 248,323 billion are in article 1, so the guide’s 35.2% of federal spending and 6.9% of GDP both recompute exactly.
What this changes in our model
Nothing, and the reason matters. We read the deficit as a rolling twelve-month outturn, not as a plan. That reading stands at 3.3% of GDP — 7,501 billion roubles through August — and scores 65 of 100, the strongest of the eight. The strength index is 46.4 of 100, in the stress zone, with all eight indicators covered. This morning’s run moved none of them. Our guide to the deficit explains why the plan and the outturn are different objects.
The planned deficits above are smaller, as a share of GDP, than the gap we currently measure. That is what a plan is for. The more useful comparison is the same year planned twice. We read article 1 of law No. 426-FZ of 28 November 2025, the 2026 budget law, in its official publication this session. It approved, for 2027: revenue of 42,910.4 billion roubles, spending of 46,096.1 billion, a deficit of 3,185.7 billion — 1.25% of a GDP then forecast at 255,498 billion — and a domestic debt ceiling of 42,184.7 billion at 1 January 2028.
Ten months later, for that same year: revenue is up 0.9%, spending up 5.7%, the GDP forecast is 2.8% lower, the debt ceiling is 5,923.9 billion higher, and the deficit is 70.9% larger. The gap between the two plans is 2,257.5 billion roubles, and the 1,500 billion the rule was told to disregard is 66.4% of it.
What we do not know
Where the 1,500 and 500 billion come from. Neither the bill nor its explanatory note identifies a financing source for the permitted excess, or explains how those two amounts were arrived at. There is no equivalent provision for 2029.
What the fund is expected to do. Annex 35 is not published with the text.
What is in the secret annexes. The bill names their numbers and not their contents.
Whether any of this becomes law. The package was registered on 30 September and has not had a first reading. The Duma can amend every figure here.
Whether the texts are final. Our copies come from a legal database, not from the Duma’s own system, which has been unreachable for six days. One oddity suggests the file deserves checking against the original when sozd.duma.gov.ru returns: bill 619-9 numbers two consecutive articles “Статья 38” and then jumps to 40.