On 31 August, at the final sitting of the outgoing National Assembly, MPs adopted the Law on mitigating the consequences of the energy crisis and the rise in the cost of living for certain categories of the population through one-off financial support and a one-off cash benefit, together with the revision of the 2026 budget. The law sets six separate amounts. Pensioners receive 35,000 dinars where their August 2026 pension was up to 31,092.11 dinars, 27,500 dinars for pensions between 31,092.12 and 56,822 dinars, and 20,000 dinars above that. Recipients of the child allowance receive 25,000 dinars per child, as do holders of the right to cash social assistance and recipients of the veterans' disability supplement; war veterans without that supplement receive 10,000 dinars; every other adult citizen receives 6,000 dinars.
The two instruments in the law work differently, and the distinction matters for who has to do something to be paid. The one-off financial support is paid automatically from existing official records, with pensioners receiving it from 14 September. The one-off cash benefit of 6,000 dinars must be claimed: applications run from 7 to 21 September, electronically through the Treasury Administration portal, with payment scheduled for 22 to 25 September. Entitlement is fixed to a single reference date - 25 August 2026 for the records-based categories, and the day the law entered into force for the rest. Where a person qualifies under more than one category, only the highest amount is paid.
The two instruments in the law work differently, and the distinction matters for who has to do something to be paid. The one-off financial support is paid automatically from existing official records, with pensioners receiving it from 14 September. The one-off cash benefit of 6,000 dinars must be claimed: applications run from 7 to 21 September, electronically through the Treasury Administration portal, with payment scheduled for 22 to 25 September. Entitlement is fixed to a single reference date - 25 August 2026 for the records-based categories, and the day the law entered into force for the rest. Where a person qualifies under more than one category, only the highest amount is paid.
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One law, six amounts
The law sets six different one-off payments. The bar shows the amount; the euro value is converted at roughly 117 dinars to the euro.
Source: Law on mitigating the consequences of the energy crisis and the rise in the cost of living for certain categories of the population, Articles 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8.
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Finance Minister Siniša Mali put the package at 980.6 million euros, presenting it as the largest transfer of its kind to date. That is the figure used throughout this text. On coverage: about 1.6 million pensioners, 150,000 holders of the right to cash social assistance, some 82,000 families receiving the child allowance for roughly 160,000 children, 91,000 war veterans, and 30,000 holiday vouchers worth 10,000 dinars each for pensioners with pensions up to 80,000 dinars. The universal payment of 6,000 dinars alone requires about 45.6 billion dinars for 7,668,000 payments - more payments than there are adult citizens, for reasons set out below.
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How many people, and how the money splits
The universal payment reaches by far the most people but takes less than half the money - and most of that is not budget money at all, but the liquid assets of a fund citizens already own.
Sources: Ministry of Finance for the total and the payment categories; Danas and N1 on the Shareholder Fund; Istinomer, August 2026, for the recipient counts. The split of the 6,000-dinar payments between the fund and the budget is derived from the two allocations - 28bn dinars from the fund, about 17.6bn from the budget - at 6,000 dinars per payment, so it sums to roughly 7.6 million rather than exactly the 7,668,000 President Vučić cited. The number of living shareholders is not published, and inherited entitlements mean payments are not the same as people. The number of recipients of the veterans’ disability supplement paid 25,000 dinars is not published separately.
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The Fiscal Council, the independent body mandated to assess public finances, was critical of how this is paid for. Its assessment of the revision found the deficit rising from 3 to 3.5 percent of GDP, or 396 billion dinars, and concluded that the revision "fundamentally worsens the fiscal result by more than one percentage point of GDP". Roughly 100 billion dinars of one-off payments are covered by 71 billion dinars from the budget and 28 billion from the Shareholder Fund, drawing on non-tax revenue that had not been planned for. Furthermore, the Council found that "for certain large items it has not been clarified who the beneficiaries are or by what criteria the funds are allocated", and warned that stimulating demand through fiscal expansion "cannot contribute to sustainable economic growth, but can intensify inflationary pressures".
Not all of that money is the state's own, and this is the part of the package that has been least explained. The 6,000 dinars is not one payment but two. For the roughly 4.8 million citizens who are shareholders of the Shareholder Fund it is paid out of the fund itself; for everyone else, the budget adds about 17.6 billion dinars, or 150 million euros. The fund was created under the Law on the right to free shares and cash compensation citizens acquire in the privatisation process: in 2011, every citizen who had turned 18 by 31 December 2007 and had not previously received free shares was given seven shares in it. Citizens own 98.65 percent of the fund directly, the state 1.35 percent. Its portfolio holds stakes in 373 companies - 250 listed joint-stock companies, 42 unlisted ones and 81 limited liability companies - of which 141 are inactive, in bankruptcy or in liquidation. Its liquid assets, 27.5 billion dinars on term deposit and some 492 million on current accounts, are almost exactly the 28 billion dinars the Fiscal Council identifies as the fund's contribution to the package.
That distinction matters for how the measure is described. For most recipients the 6,000 dinars is not a transfer from the state but a distribution of an asset they already own, announced and paid out by the government weeks before an election. It also explains why there are more payments than adults: President Aleksandar Vučić put the total at 7,668,000 payments, with some citizens receiving up to 18,000 dinars because they inherited further entitlements, while Serbia has roughly 5.4 million adults living in the country and only the original 4.8 million shareholders hold a claim on the fund. Anyone who turned 18 after 2007 was never included, which is why the younger part of the population is the part that has to apply.
The voter register, by contrast, held 6,439,141 voters on 31 August 2026, the day the law was adopted - around a million more than the estimated adult population resident in Serbia, a discrepancy CRTA has documented across successive electoral cycles. Three state records therefore count the same adult population in three different ways, and this package pays out through all three at once.
Furthermore, the fund's own management has been questioned: economist Milan Kovačević, noting the 1.35 to 98.65 percent split, has argued that the government "likes to hold other people's money and dispose of other people's property", and points out that the 27.5 billion dinars was placed on deposit by a government conclusion of 16 February 2025 on terms that were not disclosed, and that shareholders have never been paid a dividend.
Against this backdrop, the scale has no precedent in Serbia's recent electoral cycles. Istinomer has calculated that before the 2022 elections the state paid out around 540 million euros to approximately three million citizens, and before the 2023 elections at least 425 million euros to some 3.5 million. Serbia's pre-election aid in 2026 is almost twice the 2022 figure and more than twice the 2023 one. Counted from 2020, one-off payments of this kind now exceed 1.9 billion euros.
The calendar is the salient point. President Aleksandar Vučić said on 20 August, on the public broadcaster RTS, that parliamentary elections would be held "either on 18 or 25 October". At the start of September the elections had not been formally called. Applications for the 6,000 dinars therefore open, close and are paid out before the legal campaign period begins - and so before the rules attached to it apply. The outgoing Assembly adopted both the aid law and the budget revision that finances it at its final sitting, leaving no subsequent sitting at which the spending could be questioned.
Not all of that money is the state's own, and this is the part of the package that has been least explained. The 6,000 dinars is not one payment but two. For the roughly 4.8 million citizens who are shareholders of the Shareholder Fund it is paid out of the fund itself; for everyone else, the budget adds about 17.6 billion dinars, or 150 million euros. The fund was created under the Law on the right to free shares and cash compensation citizens acquire in the privatisation process: in 2011, every citizen who had turned 18 by 31 December 2007 and had not previously received free shares was given seven shares in it. Citizens own 98.65 percent of the fund directly, the state 1.35 percent. Its portfolio holds stakes in 373 companies - 250 listed joint-stock companies, 42 unlisted ones and 81 limited liability companies - of which 141 are inactive, in bankruptcy or in liquidation. Its liquid assets, 27.5 billion dinars on term deposit and some 492 million on current accounts, are almost exactly the 28 billion dinars the Fiscal Council identifies as the fund's contribution to the package.
That distinction matters for how the measure is described. For most recipients the 6,000 dinars is not a transfer from the state but a distribution of an asset they already own, announced and paid out by the government weeks before an election. It also explains why there are more payments than adults: President Aleksandar Vučić put the total at 7,668,000 payments, with some citizens receiving up to 18,000 dinars because they inherited further entitlements, while Serbia has roughly 5.4 million adults living in the country and only the original 4.8 million shareholders hold a claim on the fund. Anyone who turned 18 after 2007 was never included, which is why the younger part of the population is the part that has to apply.
The voter register, by contrast, held 6,439,141 voters on 31 August 2026, the day the law was adopted - around a million more than the estimated adult population resident in Serbia, a discrepancy CRTA has documented across successive electoral cycles. Three state records therefore count the same adult population in three different ways, and this package pays out through all three at once.
Furthermore, the fund's own management has been questioned: economist Milan Kovačević, noting the 1.35 to 98.65 percent split, has argued that the government "likes to hold other people's money and dispose of other people's property", and points out that the 27.5 billion dinars was placed on deposit by a government conclusion of 16 February 2025 on terms that were not disclosed, and that shareholders have never been paid a dividend.
Against this backdrop, the scale has no precedent in Serbia's recent electoral cycles. Istinomer has calculated that before the 2022 elections the state paid out around 540 million euros to approximately three million citizens, and before the 2023 elections at least 425 million euros to some 3.5 million. Serbia's pre-election aid in 2026 is almost twice the 2022 figure and more than twice the 2023 one. Counted from 2020, one-off payments of this kind now exceed 1.9 billion euros.
Serbia's pre-election aid in 2026 is almost twice the 2022 figure and more than twice the 2023 one.
The calendar is the salient point. President Aleksandar Vučić said on 20 August, on the public broadcaster RTS, that parliamentary elections would be held "either on 18 or 25 October". At the start of September the elections had not been formally called. Applications for the 6,000 dinars therefore open, close and are paid out before the legal campaign period begins - and so before the rules attached to it apply. The outgoing Assembly adopted both the aid law and the budget revision that finances it at its final sitting, leaving no subsequent sitting at which the spending could be questioned.
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The payment calendar, and the election calendar
Every step of the payout falls before the legal campaign period, which begins only once the elections are formally called. Filled markers are steps already passed.
Sources: the law as adopted, Articles 8 and 11; Ministry of Finance payment schedule; N1, 20 August 2026, on the announced election dates.
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CRTA's monitoring has recorded 11 cases in which ruling-party profiles on social networks presented budget-funded investments, donations and cash aid to citizens as their own. ODIHR's standing recommendation that state functions be clearly separated from party functions has remained unimplemented across successive cycles. As Marija Stefanović, research manager at CRTA, put it, it is not disputed that the state helps citizens, but it is disputed when such payments are announced and paid out immediately before elections, because they can then hardly be separated from an attempt by the authorities to win voters' favour with public money. Accordingly, two questions follow the package rather than the amounts in it: whether one-off transfers do anything durable about the cost of living, and whether public funds are being deployed in the service of an election campaign.
