Where Does the Philippine Government Actually Spend Its Money?

Every year around August, Congress starts debating the national budget. Lawmakers make speeches, agencies defend their line items, and the media covers the biggest numbers. But I've found that very few people — including people who follow politics closely — actually sit down with the full budget data and look at how spending has shifted over time.

So I did. I pulled budget allocation and expenditure data from the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) and the Bureau of Treasury, covering fiscal years 2010 through 2024. That spans three full administrations and the start of a fourth.

The Scope

The 2024 national budget hit P5.768 trillion. That's the largest in Philippine history, up from P1.54 trillion in 2010. Even adjusted for inflation, real spending has roughly doubled in 14 years.

I tracked spending across five major categories: education, health, infrastructure, defense/public order, and debt servicing. Each category tells its own story.

For the technical side, I built inflation-adjusted time series using CPI data from the PSA, then calculated each sector's share of total spending year by year. This makes it possible to see whether a sector is truly growing or just keeping pace with the overall budget expansion.

What the Numbers Show

Education has consistently been the largest spending category. The DepEd budget alone accounts for about 14-16% of the total national budget in most years. That's mandated by the constitution, which requires education to receive the highest allocation. But here's the thing — education's share has actually been shrinking slightly since 2020, even as the absolute number keeps growing. Other sectors have been eating into its relative position.

Health spending tells the most dramatic story. Before COVID, the Department of Health budget hovered around 3-4% of the national budget. In 2021, it jumped to over 7%. That surge funded vaccine procurement, temporary treatment facilities, and testing infrastructure. By 2023, it had started settling back down, but it's still above pre-pandemic levels.

Infrastructure is where you can see political priorities most clearly. The "Build Build Build" program under the Duterte administration pushed infrastructure spending from about 4.5% to over 6% of the budget. New expressways, airports, railway projects — the numbers tracked with the rhetoric. The current administration has maintained most of that spending level, though the project mix has shifted.

Debt servicing is the quiet giant. Interest payments and principal amortization eat up a significant chunk of the budget every year — typically 12-15%. After the pandemic borrowing spree, that number has been creeping upward. It's not the kind of spending that generates headlines, but it constrains everything else the government can do.

Patterns Across Administrations

One thing that surprised me is how little the broad spending patterns change between presidents. The categories shift by a few percentage points, but the overall structure is remarkably stable. Education stays on top. Debt stays heavy. Infrastructure fluctuates the most.

The biggest disruption in the entire 14-year period wasn't a change in administration — it was COVID. The pandemic forced a reallocation unlike anything in the dataset. The Bayanihan stimulus packages redirected hundreds of billions of pesos in ways that no normal budget cycle would allow.

• 2020-2021: Health and social protection surged while infrastructure dipped as projects got delayed
• 2022-2023: Gradual return to pre-pandemic patterns, with infrastructure rebounding
• 2024: The budget reflects a post-pandemic normal, with debt servicing now higher than before

Wrapping Up

Budget data is public — the DBM publishes it every year. But it's spread across dozens of PDF tables and reports that aren't easy to work with. A big part of this project was just cleaning and standardizing the data into a format that allows cross-year comparison.

If I had more time, I'd extend this analysis to include local government budgets (IRA/NTA allocations) and off-budget spending through GOCCs. The national budget is only part of the picture. But even on its own, it shows that the Philippines' fiscal priorities are more driven by structural commitments than by whoever happens to be sitting in Malacanang.