The Government approved a state budget amendment for 2026 on 2 September. Under it, 560 million lei go towards exceptional one-off payments for public-sector employees whose average monthly salary does not exceed 20,000 lei.
The amounts, by personnel category:
- 4,000 lei — education staff (management, teaching and auxiliary teaching personnel)
- 3,000 lei — employees in social services, healthcare, defence, law enforcement, culture, youth and sport, public administration and the judiciary
- 2,000 lei — manual workers and technical staff
Trebuie să facem anumite schimbări în buget, inclusiv pentru a ne asuma costurile suplimentare și obligațiile în fața oamenilor: în primul rând, pentru a oferi compensații în sezonul rece, dar și pentru a achita plata unică către profesori, polițiști și alți bugetari. Vasile Tofan, Prime Minister
Why one-off payments, not raises
The one-off payments compensate for the postponement of salary increases that had been promised for 1 September. On 19 August, Prime Minister Vasile Tofan announced that the new salary law would not take effect in September but from 1 January 2027, citing a lack of budgetary resources. According to ProTV Chișinău’s reporting from the 19 August press conference, the increases from 1 January would range from about 5% in higher education to 20% for the lowest-paid categories. Implementing them would cost over 5 billion lei, and the salary fund would rise from 33 to over 38 billion.
What else the amendment contains
Besides the 560 million for one-off payments, the amendment allocates:
- 651.7 million lei in additional salary funding, including for educational institutions under local public authorities
- 1 billion lei added to the National Regional and Local Development Fund, to complete local infrastructure projects
- 300 million lei to the Road Fund
- 1.6 billion lei in transfers to the state social insurance budget, of which 550 million for energy compensation in the form of cash payments
The budget deficit rises to 23.07 billion lei, or 5.95% of GDP. The Prime Minister said that “we must be very rigorous and disciplined in adopting next year’s budget, so that we have a budget as balanced as possible and do not reach such a large deficit.”
What is not yet known
The gov.md communiqué speaks of “one-off payments.” On 19 August, at the press conference, the PM had described a different mechanism: for education, the 4,000 lei would come, according to ProTV Chișinău’s reporting, “at a thousand lei per month, from September through the end of the year.” The two formulations are not identical. The exact payment schedule is to be set by a Government distribution decision, unpublished at the time of writing.
The exact number of eligible recipients in the Ungheni district is also not public. Approximately 876 teaching staff work in the district’s 46 educational institutions, but the 4,000 lei payment covers a broader group — management, teaching and auxiliary teaching personnel — and to these are added the categories receiving 3,000 and 2,000 lei. A district total cannot be calculated without institutional data.
The budget-amendment figures — payment amounts, salary threshold, allocations by purpose and the deficit — come from the communiqué of the Government of the Republic of Moldova dated 2 September 2026. The postponement of salary increases from 1 September to 1 January 2027 was announced by Prime Minister Vasile Tofan at the press conference on 19 August 2026 (as reported by ProTV Chișinău). The figures on teaching staff in the Ungheni district come from Triunghi.md’s calculation based on Education Directorate data, published in the article “A fresh start in education” on 6 August 2026. The exact number of eligible recipients in the district has not been published.