Where the Union rupee goes
What the Government of India expects to collect in 2026‑27, what it plans to spend it on, and what your own income tax works out to across every head of spending.
What this is
The Union Budget is published as a stack of documents most people never open. This reads the headline one — Budget at a Glance — and lays out the two halves of it: every rupee the Union government expects to receive, and every head it expects to spend on. Four columns throughout: what was actually spent in 2024‑25, what was budgeted and then revised for 2025‑26, and what is budgeted for 2026‑27.
Work out your share
If I paid rupees in income tax, my share of spending on is…
Change any underlined value. This is a proportional share, not a trace — see “What this number is not” below.
What this number is not
It is not a trace of your money. Taxes on income are roughly — of what the Union government receives; the rest comes from corporation tax, GST, customs, excise, dividends and borrowing, and nothing marks one rupee as yours. What the figure shows is proportion: if the Union rupee is spent in these shares, this is what your contribution looks like at that scale. Anyone who tells you your income tax paid for a particular road is telling you something the budget cannot show.
Reading it responsibly
The Excel is not the authority.
Estimates are not outcomes. Only the 2024‑25 column is Actuals. Budget Estimates are what was planned before the year began; Revised Estimates are the mid-year correction. The gap between them is often the interesting part — compare 2025‑26 BE against 2025‑26 RE to see where plans met reality.
Interest is the largest single head, and it is not a service. At — it exceeds defence, education and health. It is the cost of past borrowing, not money spent on anything this year — which is why a share of your tax “going to interest” is real but describes debt service, not a programme.
The lines do not sum exactly. This is rounding in the source, where each line is published to the nearest crore — not a missing head.
Eight years, and why the rows do not all run the full width. Heads are renamed, split and merged between budgets, so a blank is a change in what the budget published, not a year of zero spending. Two worth knowing: from 2023‑24 Home Affairs absorbs Union Territories, which were separate heads before, so the two rows are not one series; and the 2023‑24 document reports agriculture excluding PM‑KISAN while listing PM‑KISAN separately. Read the series for direction, not as a like-for-like ledger.
How the older years were checked. Each budget restates the previous year's estimate, so consecutive documents overlap by one column and must agree — and every head in a year must sum to that year's own published total. Both checks run in CI. The second is what caught a sub-line (“of which Transfer to GST Compensation Fund”) being counted as a head in its own right, which had overstated every older year by 2–6%. Nothing in the text revealed that; only the arithmetic did.
Centre and States are different budgets. A large share of Union receipts is transferred straight to the States and never spent by the Centre — the devolution line in the Transfers tab. State budgets, which fund most schools, clinics and police, are published separately by each State and are not in this explorer.
Figures transcribed from Budget at a Glance, Union Budget 2026‑27 (Ministry of Finance, Government of India), read directly from the published workbook rather than typed by hand. All amounts in ₹ crore unless shown otherwise. This is an independent, source-linked interface for learning and discussion — for methodology and authoritative interpretation, consult the Ministry of Finance directly. ImpactMojo is not affiliated with the Ministry or the Government of India.