₴50 million shortfall: Pervomaisk to ask Cabinet to finance salaries of teachers and social workers

Pervomaisk is short of 50 million hryvnias to cover the state-initiated salary increase. Photo: archive NikVesti

The budget of the Pervomaisk City Council is short of about 50 million hryvnias to finance the state-initiated salary increases for teachers and social workers.

Deputies plan to appeal to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and People's Deputy Maksym Dyrdin with a request to allocate the necessary funds from the state budget. The draft decision has been published on the city council's website, according to NikVesti.

The appeal states that in December 2025, the Cabinet of Ministers adopted Resolutions №1749 and №1750, which provide for a 40% increase in the salaries of teachers and a 2.5-fold increase in the salaries of social workers. However, no state funding was provided for the implementation of these decisions at the time of their adoption.

«The costs incurred by local authorities as a result of state decisions must be compensated by the state,» the deputies note in their appeal.

According to the deputies' calculations, raising the salaries of social workers will require an additional 24 million hryvnias, and raising the salaries of teachers will require 26.5 million hryvnias. Without state compensation, this could lead to layoffs, the transfer of employees to part-time work, an increased workload on staff, and a deterioration in the quality of educational and social services.

It should be noted that a similar situation has arisen in Mykolaiv. Mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych said that the city budget does not allow for a 30% increase in teachers' salaries, as initiated by the state from January 2026, and a further 20% increase from September.

According to Oleksandr Sienkevych, the city is short of 1.5 billion hryvnias, so it is impossible to provide salary increases on its own. The mayor stressed that increasing teachers' salaries is only possible with the support of the state budget.