Key takeaways from FY26 budget

Finance Adviser Dr Salehuddin Ahmed today proposed a Tk 7,90,000 crore budget for the 2025–26 fiscal year, which is 12.7 percent of the GDP.

In his budget speech, the finance adviser highlighted several key economic indicators and plans across sectors.

He said the foreign exchange reserves rose to $27.4 billion in April due to encouraging growth in remittance inflows and stable export earnings.

The government is also expected to receive approximately $3.6 billion in budget support from various development partners by June this year, the adviser said.

To reduce reliance on subsidies in the energy sector, a plan has been undertaken to cut the overall cost of power generation by 10 percent.

In the energy sector, the finance adviser said a plan has been adopted to supply 648 million cubic feet of gas from domestic sources within this year and to extract an additional 1,500 million cubic feet of gas from local wells by 2028.

Regarding the banking sector, he informed that the total amount of defaulted loans in this sector increased from 10.11 percent in June 2023 to 20.20 percent in December 2024, as the government adopted the Loan Lease Classification and provisioning system in line with international standards.

• Online shopping gets costlier

• Tax-free income limit to go up from FY27

• Cost of flats to go up

• Source tax on supply of essential commodities halved

• Advance tax on industrial raw materials cut

• Duty-free import of cereals, life-saving drugs to continue

• Corporate tax may rise for non-listed firms

• Customs duty on medical equipment may be waived for large hospitals

• Duty exemption to give relief to pharma industry, chronic patients

• Tax on land transfer to be reduced

• Income up to Tk 500,000 from agriculture is tax-exempted

• No surcharge on electric car

• Stockmarket has three good news