Many unpleasant surprises and a number of red lines - this is how the President of the Management Board of the Bulgarian Industrial Association (BIA), Dobri Mitrev, described the draft 2026 budget. He was adamant that the short timeframe given to review the massive volume of figures and texts did not prevent them from analysing the financial plan and identifying what he called “punches in the face of Bulgarian enterprises.”
Speaking on the programme “The Day Live,” Mitrev outlined the main “red lines” that employer organisations cannot accept.
Mitrev calculated that this amounts to 2 billion leva annually taken from businesses and workers, without guaranteeing anything in return.
“This directly removes resources from enterprises and employees in order to maintain the comfort of the bureaucratic apparatus,” he said, adding that the measure is inflationary.
“This does nothing to help the working people who are already filling the social security funds. Businesses are facing a situation where they do not know how to plan their labour costs,” he added.
The BIA President called this “a dismantling of the tax and social security model.”
Mitrev explained that as of 30 September, 87 million leva had been collected from the dividend tax, against a planned 170 million by year-end. For next year, the government plans to collect 340 million leva, which employers consider absolutely impossible. Mitrev expects that next year’s revenue from this tax will be even lower than this year’s.
According to Mitrev, such a transition would take six months to one year, and it is absurd to implement it starting from 1 January 2026. He also estimated that the costs would reach hundreds of millions of leva.
In conclusion, the BIA President stated that employer organisations will not support the budget in the Tripartite Council, because doing so would mean betraying working people. He also announced upcoming protests by employer organisations.
