Where the NI Executive's money went, department by department and area by area, from 2016-17 to 2024-25. Pick a year, switch between day-to-day and investment spending, and click any department to open it up.
Every figure with a dotted underline can be clicked to see exactly where it comes from and how it was calculated.
This page is the overview. Four more areas go deeper, each with its own web address you can share.
Ranked by size. Growth compares with 2016-17. Click a department to see inside it.
Almost all of the Executive's money arrives as a grant from the UK Treasury. Separately, the ONS works out how much tax is raised in Northern Ireland and how much public money is spent here, including a share of UK-wide costs such as defence and debt interest.
2025-26 Budget, £19.3bn in total.
A few headline results for the biggest departments, next to how much each department's spending has changed since 2016-17 after inflation. Putting them side by side doesn't show that one caused the other: results also depend on need, demand, wages, policy decisions and things outside government's control. Click a card to open that department.
Each June the Finance Minister reports how each department's spending compared with its final budget for the year just ended. Departments usually land within 1% of that final budget, but that's partly because final budgets are revised during the year through monitoring rounds. The real pressure shows up as in-year rescues from the Treasury, noted for each year. Orange bars are underspends; blue bars are overspends.
Pay is the single biggest part of day-to-day spending. The NI Fiscal Council's new analysis (September 2026) finds the main pressure isn't higher pay rates: median public sector pay here is slightly below England's. It's that NI employs more public servants per person, and funds some staff (social care, Translink, NI Water, the Housing Executive) who in England are paid by councils, companies or fares. The Council calls this an initial analysis, published for discussion.
England = 100%. The dashed line is 124%, the level NI's funding is set to reflect.
The cost of the Assembly (MLAs’ pay, their offices and staff, and running Parliament Buildings) and of the Executive’s political offices: ministers and special advisers. Every figure is from audited accounts or official publications, including what was paid while the Assembly wasn’t sitting.
Deals announced at Westminster arrive as extra lines in the block grant, Budgets and Estimates, then get spread across departments. This traces what was promised, where it was recorded as received, and what it was allocated to.
Big capital projects here have a long record of costing more and taking longer than first approved. The Audit Office tracks the major ones; the Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee called the overspend “unacceptable”. Costs below are the Audit Office’s audited figures (to August 2023), with newer official or press figures shown separately and dated. Tap any figure to see where it comes from. There’s no single official register of every project, so the second list is compiled from published sources and may be incomplete.
These aren’t in the Audit Office case studies, so there’s no audited original-versus-latest comparison.
Projects are often announced with fanfare and then quietly cancelled, stalled or shrunk, and it’s rarely reported what happens to the money. This tracks how far each one got, what was spent, and where the money is now. No official register of this exists, so the list is compiled from published sources and is incomplete. Know one we’ve missed? Email corrections@nipublicmoney.uk.
Councils here do much less than in Britain: bins, leisure centres, parks, planning, environmental health, cemeteries, tourism and arts. Schools, roads, housing, social care, libraries and water are run by Stormont departments. The 11 councils spent about £1.15bn in 2023-24, compared with £31.7bn of NI Executive spending, and most of it is paid for by local ratepayers rather than by Stormont.
Shaded by spending per resident. Tap a council to see it.
Every grant-aided school’s budget for 2026-27, set by the Department of Education’s funding formula, with its pupil numbers, the share of pupils entitled to free school meals and the share with special educational needs. Tap a school to see what its budget is made up of. Small rural schools and schools serving poorer areas get more per pupil by design. Compare like with like: primary with primary, post-primary with post-primary.
Rates are the one sizeable tax paid directly to Stormont and your council. Your bill is your home's capital value (its estimated 2005 value) times two rates: a regional rate set by the Executive and a district rate set by your council. The example value below is only a starting point: look up your home's value with Land & Property Services and enter it.
Before any reliefs (for example Housing Benefit, Lone Pensioner Allowance or Disabled Person's Allowance), which can reduce a bill substantially. Find your home's capital value: nidirect: calculate your estimated rate bill.
Your regional rate split in proportion to how departments spent their money in the latest year. Illustrative only: rates go into the Executive's general pot, and they cover only about 4% of its budget; the rest is mainly the Treasury block grant.
Political, budget, policy and external events that shaped NI's public finances. Grey bands mark the two periods with no Executive, when budgets were set by the Secretary of State and passed at Westminster. The same bands appear on the growth chart above.
Every dataset used on this page, with what was taken from it. Derived figures: per person = spending ÷ population; real terms = cash × 100 ÷ GDP deflator for that year (2025-26 = 100); share = part ÷ total; growth = (later − earlier) ÷ earlier.
The nine Executive departments' spending limits (DEL), plus benefits and pensions (AME) as a separate line because they're demand-led rather than decided in the NI budget. Local councils and public corporations aren't included. Small non-ministerial bodies (Assembly, PPS, Audit Office and others) appear in the table only.
Departments restructured their spending areas in 2017-18, 2019-20 and 2022-23, so some areas stop and new ones start. Department totals stay comparable; individual area lines don't always run the full nine years. The budget drill-down comes from a different source (the Estimates) and covers 2021-22 onwards.
Figures are in cash terms unless you switch Prices to Real terms, which restates every year in 2025-26 prices using HM Treasury's GDP deflator (June 2026). NISRA rounds to £1m, so rows may not sum exactly. Per-person figures use the population implied by NISRA's own per-person totals. The 2020-21 jump is largely Covid-19 support.