Social standards in the draft budget 2025 remain frozen, since their increase requires significant resources, which are limited, in particular, increasing the minimum wage by UAH 100, to UAH 8,100, would cost UAH 5.3 billion for the 2025 budget, Head of Verkhovna Rada Committee on budget Roksolana Pidlasa said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

"According to the calculations of the Ministry of Finance, if this year it [the minimum wage indicator] is increased by 100 UAH, then the state budget expenditures will increase by UAH 5.3 billion. That is, if the minimum wage is increased, for example, by UAH 1,000, to UAH 9,000 then this will be more than UAH 50 billion of budget expenditures," she said.

Speaking about the level of the subsistence minimum, Pidlasa said it is impossible to bring it up to the real indicator, since many payments are tied to it. According to the committee's head, the category of "subsistence minimum" should be abandoned altogether in budget calculations. "Since it causes a lot of negativity towards the government when we allegedly say in an official document, in the state budget, that a person should be able to live on UAH 3,000, while the Ministry of Social Policy calculates the actual, real subsistence minimum at about UAH 9,000," the head of the budget committee said.

In her opinion, instead, it is worth establishing some basic calculation value to which the salaries of judges, prosecutors, anti-corruption agencies, etc. will be tied.

The Verkhovna Rada committee's head said the need to revise social standards will arise if the GDP forecast for the first half of next year is exceeded. "The current forecast is 2.7% real GDP growth for 2025. If, based on the results of the first half of the year, we revise the macro forecast and understand that it is more than 2.7%, then it will be necessary to revise social standards," she said.

In general, Pidlasa said the social sector is the only category of budget expenditures in which it is possible to conduct effective optimization, in particular due to its capacity. "Unfortunately, for me, and apparently for many people, the budget was balanced at the expense of social programs, because it is impossible to balance it at the expense of anything else. The next categories in terms of expenditure are education and medicine, and each of these budgets is half the size of the one allocated for social programs, it is difficult to effectively optimize anything there," she said.

The committee's head said the Ministry of Social Policy is constantly working to verify recipients of social benefits and improve their targeting, adding that there are savings in the use of these funds, which provides room for cutting costs. Pidlasa said the reduction of the Ministry of Social Policy programs will not affect the recipients of assistance in any way: they will continue to receive it. "The main burden of reduction was taken by the Pension Fund: we reduced its expenses in 2025 by UAH 34 billion. There are several reasons for this. I am not sure that this will remain so in the final version of the budget, because this is, of course, a point of tension," she said.