The chancellor’s spring budget will take place in March, the Treasury has announced.
Rachel Reeves will deliver the budget, known as the “spring forecast”, on 3 March 2026.
She has asked the independent budget watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), to “prepare an economic and fiscal forecast” for publication on the same day.
The Treasury said the government has committed to delivering only one major fiscal event a year, at the autumn budget.
As a result, it said the spring forecast will “not make an assessment of the government’s performance against the fiscal mandate and will instead provide an interim update on the economy and public finances”.
However, the last spring statement saw the chancellor announce a series of welfare cuts, extra money for construction training and defence, and a crackdown on tax avoidance.
The 2026 spring statement is set to be another big political event, due to continuing concern over the state of the economy and the controversy in the build up to November’s budget, when Ms Reeves announced tax hikes.
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She was also accused of not revealing the true state of the nation’s finances in the run-up to the budget after she repeatedly warned about a downgrade to the UK’s economic productivity forecasts.
On the day of the budget, it emerged the OBR told her in mid-September the public finances were in better shape than widely believed.
However, Ms Reeves denied misleading the public.
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She said she had been “upfront” about her decision-making, and the OBR figures were clear there had been “less fiscal space than there was”.
All eyes will also be on the OBR during the spring forecast, after it accidentally published details of Ms Reeves’ November budget nearly an hour before the chancellor stood up to deliver it.
The head of the OBR, Richard Hughes, quit over the early release. An investigation found it was due to “leadership failings” over security measures rather than a malicious cyberattack.
