The Tamesis
March 31, 2026
Tokyo – The Liberal Democratic Party informed the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan on Monday that it has abandoned plans to pass the fiscal year 2026 budget bill this fiscal year.
Instead, the plenary session of the House and Senate passed the fiscal year 2026 interim budget bill that day – intended as a stopgap measure before the new fiscal year budget is passed.
“We will have to give up the target of passing the budget this fiscal year,” Yoshihiko Isozaki, chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party’s upper house parliamentary affairs committee, told Democratic Party of Japan lawmaker Yoshitaka Saito on Monday morning. Saito accepted his proposal. Isozaki also suggested to Saito that the Senate Budget Committee should entrust relevant committees to review the fiscal year 2026 budget proposals of various ministries and agencies on Wednesday and Thursday.
With the support of a majority in the latest House of Representatives election, the government and the ruling party shortened the House of Representatives’ consideration of the fiscal year 2026 budget bill from the usual one month to an unusually short two weeks, striving to pass the budget before the end of March.
On March 16, the Senate began deliberations. However, since the ruling coalition does not hold a majority in the House of Representatives, it can only agree to the opposition party’s request for sufficient deliberation time.
The interim budget bill was debated at the House of Representatives Budget Committee on Monday morning, with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi saying, “We decided to prepare an interim budget to ensure that there is no gap in funds.”
The provisional budget is passed by the plenary session of the House of Commons, sent to the House of Lords, considered by the Budget Committee, and then passed again by the plenary session. Both the centrist Reform Alliance and the People’s Democratic Party, which called for the drafting of an interim budget, voted in favor.
The interim budget covers the period from Wednesday to April 11, when the 2026 budget is automatically enacted. General account expenditures for the year totaled 8.56 trillion yen, including local government tax appropriations and social security-related expenditures such as pensions and welfare.
The last time an interim budget bill was submitted to Congress was in fiscal year 2015, when then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in power.
