The United Nations is moving to shrink its 2026 regular budget by 15.1 percent and cut 2,681 posts, as Secretary-General António Guterres warns that unpaid dues of about $1.6 billion have left the organization in its most fragile cash position in years.
Budget plan slashes $577 million from 2026 core spending
On December 1, 2025, Secretary-General António Guterres formally presented a 2026 core budget that would fall to 3.238 billion dollars, down 577 million dollars from the 2025 appropriation, a drop of about 15.1 percent.
This is according to his presentation to the General Assembly’s budget committee and the revised estimates he sent earlier in the year. The cuts are laid out in the revised programme budget for 2026 and related support account adjustments and were highlighted in Guterres’s briefing to the Fifth Committee. These figures are set out in the Secretary-General’s revised estimates report A/80/400 and A/80/6.
The proposed 2026 budget covers core political, humanitarian, human rights, economic, social and communications work and includes funding for 37 special political missions, which themselves face reductions compared with 2025, according to UN documents and budget briefings.
The plan still requires negotiation in the Fifth Committee and final adoption by the full General Assembly, which is expected to act later in December 2025. That timetable is reflected on the Fifth Committee’s official 2026 budget docket and in external tracking of the UN80 process.
2,681 posts to go under UN80 staffing reduction
At the heart of the plan is a sharp contraction of the UN staffing table. The revised estimates reduce the regular-budget staffing table for 2026 to 11,594 posts, a cut of 2,681 posts, or 18.8 percent, compared with the approved staffing table for 2025. The same report trims a further 206 posts from the support account for peacekeeping operations for the second half of the 2025-26 period.
Guterres has framed the staffing and budget cuts as a response to a deepening liquidity crunch rather than a simple efficiency exercise. In his latest briefing on the UN’s financial situation, he told the Fifth Committee that the organization ended 2024 with 760 million dollars in unpaid assessments, most of which remained outstanding, and that 877 million dollars in 2025 contributions had yet to be received. This brings total arrears to about 1.586 billion dollars, or nearly 1.6 billion dollars.
The Secretary-General warned UN budget delegates that the organization faces “its most fragile cash position in years” and even risk of bankruptcy if Member States continue to fall behind on assessed contributions.
