Mykolaiv will be able to increase salaries of officials with financial assistance from the state budget

Mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych and Mykolaiv City Council Secretary Dmytro Falko at the session on 30 December. Screenshot from the video

If Mykolaiv's budget receives additional revenues, salaries for local government officials may be increased.

This was stated by the mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych during a session on Tuesday, 30 December.

After approving the city budget for 2026, Mykolaiv City Council deputy Oleksandr Bereza asked whether employees of executive bodies should expect a salary increase.

«Is it still possible, if we see that the 2026 budget is not negative and is being implemented, that people will be able to count on their salaries being at least at the level of 2025? At least taking into account the inflation coefficients and indexation», the councillor asked.

City council deputy Oleksandr Bereza, faction «Proposal». Photo by NikVesti

In response, Oleksandr Sienkevych acknowledged that the problem of low salaries in the city council is acute. According to him, the difference between the remuneration of local government officials and civil servants reaches 50-100%.

«We have local government officials and state officials. So the difference between the salaries of civil servants and local government officials is incredible. It is 50-100% higher. A large percentage of people leave because we do not have decent salaries. Secondly, some councillors allow us to say: «We will not allow officials to raise their salaries!». But in fact, we said that some officials receive 15, 18, 20 thousand hryvnias, which is less than the cashiers of some supermarkets in the city. And to work here, you need to have at least a university degree, work experience, seniority, and so on», he said.

The mayor also stressed that the issue of raising salaries directly depends on the city's financial capabilities.

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«If we have such a financial opportunity, I really hope that the state will help us. I hope that we will be able to raise the salaries of these people we are talking about to the average salary in the region», he added.

As a reminder, the budget requests of the Mykolaiv City Council for 2026 included an increase in the average estimated salary for local government employees to 25,000 hryvnias, which is 66.7% more than in 2025, when the figure was 15,000 hryvnias.

It should be noted that the updated structure of executive bodies, which the deputies failed to approve, did not reduce the number of executive bodies and still has 1115 employees.

However, in 2025, the annual salaries of the mayor of Mykolaiv and his deputies ranged from 930,000 hryvnias to more than 1 million hryvnias. More than 470 thousand hryvnias was paid to them for healthcare alone. Read more about how much the mayor of Mykolaiv and his deputies earned in the NikVesti article.

As for the new budget for 2026, according to Mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych, it is actually a subsistence budget and does not cover all the needs of the community.

In total, budget revenues for 2026 amount to 5 billion 546 million hryvnias, while total budget expenditures amount to 5 billion 275 million 353 thousand 815 hryvnias.

To cover the needs of the city, at the session on 30 December, the deputies appealed to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to provide an additional subsidy from the state budget.

The deputies also appealed to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and the Cabinet of Ministers to increase the salaries of cultural workers. The document refers to the critically low level of remuneration in the cultural sector.

According to the city's estimates, its own budget revenues for 2026 are only 82.5% of the real need, and the financial resource deficit exceeds 1 billion 140 million hryvnias.