In 2025/26 the UK public sector spent £1,360bn but raised only £1,230bn, leaving a £130bn gap covered by borrowing. You're the Chancellor. Cut spending, change taxes, or both, and see how close you get.
£0bn
cut from spending
£0bn
raised from tax
£130bn
left to borrow
0
public sector jobs affected
Move a slider below to get started.Target: close £65bn
Spending choices
Drag a slider, tap the − and + buttons to nudge by 1, or type an exact change. Use a minus sign for cuts. There are no limits: cut to zero (−100%) or increase as much as you like. Open "adjust in detail" to set each part of an area separately. Each area shows roughly how many people work in it, and how many jobs a cut of that size would involve if it were spread evenly.
Type changes as
Tax choices
Raise a tax to bring in more money, or cut it and watch the gap grow. Each slider moves the rate in the units shown (pennies, percentage points, or pounds), and the − and + buttons nudge it by 1, and the money raised or lost uses HMRC's official ready reckoner for 2026/27.
Your budget
Save & reload your budget
Download everything you've changed as a spreadsheet file, then load it back another day, or send it to someone else to open here.
The file lists every spending area and tax lever, your change to each, and what it is worth in £bn, so it opens in Excel or Google Sheets as well as here.
What might this mean?
When you've finished, see a rough idea of what your changes could be equivalent to in the real world.
About the numbers
Starting figures are 2025/26, the same as on the dashboard: spending £1,360bn, income £1,230bn, borrowing £130bn, from the OBR and HM Treasury via the Commons and Lords libraries. Some sub-items are estimates.
Tax changes use HMRC's "Direct effects of illustrative tax changes" (June 2025 edition, covering changes from April 2026). Those figures are for 2026/27 and include HMRC's allowance for behaviour, such as people working or spending differently. They are applied here to the 2025/26 starting point, so treat them as indicative. HMRC warns that some changes do not scale neatly: doubling a rate rise does not always double the money.
Staff numbers are approximate headcounts from ONS public sector employment (June 2026) and related sources: NHS about 2.07 million, public sector education about 1.67 million, civil service about 557,000, police including civilian staff about 279,000, and armed forces about 149,000. The UK public sector employs about 6.2 million people in total.
The jobs estimate assumes a cut falls evenly across an area, including its staff, so a 5% cut is shown as 5% of its workforce. Real cuts rarely work like that: governments can instead freeze pay, stop projects, cut grants, reduce services or leave posts vacant, and many staff are employed by councils, schools or contractors rather than directly by government. Treat the number as a scale, not a forecast.
"What might this mean?" uses rough average costs to show scale: about £50,000 a year for a nurse, £58,000 for a teacher and £60,000 for a police officer including employer costs, about £54,000 per prison place, and the national funding formula minimum of £5,115 per primary pupil and £6,640 per secondary pupil in England. Claimant numbers are approximate. The full new state pension is £230.25 a week in 2025/26.
Cuts and tax rises can have knock-on effects not modelled here: fewer public sector jobs mean less income tax and more benefit claims, and lower spending can affect growth.
Debt interest and accounting adjustments are locked, because the government can't simply choose to pay less of them. Per-person figures use a population of about 69.5 million and 28.6 million households. Your choices are saved in this browser only.