Gauteng Budget Dashboard 2022/23 - 2028/29
Making budget data publicly accessible is an important part of building evidence-based policies. Budget data helps us answer difficult questions on a range of developmental questions, including whether we are making the right and sufficient allocations to reduce poverty, address inequality and improve the chances people have for upward social mobility.
The GCRO is committed to helping government officials, civil society and ordinary residents access and understand government budget information. In December 2025, we published an Interactive Visualisation highlighting key budget pressures facing the Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG) based on data from the GPG’s 2025/26 budget and the midyear 2025/26 national and Gauteng Medium Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS). In this Interactive Visualisation, we deepen this work, this time presenting three budget dashboards using publicly available data for the 2026/27 financial year.
Using the dashboard
Assembling financial/budget data for seven financial years – 2022/23 up to 2028/29 – the three dashboards track:
The provincial equitable share for South Africa’s nine provinces. Dashboard 1 maps the equitable share for all provinces, each province’s population share, as well as the average annual medium-term expenditure framework (MTEF) growth using 2025/26 as a base.
Changes over time for each provincial department . Dashboard 2 zooms in on Gauteng and gives an overview of departmental budgets for the seven financial years, using both a treemap to visualise the share of each departmental budget, and a line graph to visualise departmental budget changes over time.
A programme level budget breakdown for each of the GPG’s 16 departments . Through a series of line graphs, Dashboard 3 provides a more detailed breakdown of each department’s programme-level budgeting from 2022/23 to 2028/29.
For all three dashboards, we encourage readers to use the available filters for financial years as well as for departments and programmes to change the view on what they are most interested in. For instance, using filters for Dashboard 3 (Programmes) makes it possible to compare individual departmental programmes, either against one another or relative to the total provincial budget for Gauteng. Using filters for the line graphs on Dashboard 2 (Provincial Budget Change) will also allow the reader to isolate a single programme and track the departmental trend across the 2022/23-to-2028/29 timeframe. Meanwhile, Gauteng’s provincial budget, as depicted on Dashboard 2’s line graph, shows how each department’s budget has changed in relation to 2022/23.
Interested users may benefit from this video walkthrough.
Definitions of key concepts
Provincial equitable share: The Provincial Equitable Share is South Africa's way of ensuring that all nine provinces - whether rich or poor, large or small - have funds to provide services like education, healthcare, and basic infrastructure. The national government collects the money and distributes it with a formula that gives more to provinces that need it most. The equitable share is an unconditional transfer. Additionally, the transfer is based on a formula that includes education, health, population, institutional issues, and poverty and other socio-economic components.
Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF): The MTEF is South Africa's government "financial roadmap" – a three-year rolling plan that tells us how much money is available, where it will be spent, and how spending aligns with national development goals, while also ensuring governments’ fiscal discipline and accountability. In more formal terms, the MTEF is a structured government budgeting and planning tool that sets out the South African government’s fiscal and expenditure plans over a rolling three-year period. It provides a forward-looking framework that links government policies, strategic priorities, and available financial resources.
Index value: The dashboard uses index values. Each of the programmes is indexed to 100, using 2022/23 as the base year, to provide a standardised, easy-to-read measure of how any variable has changed over time, with the 2022/23 financial year serving as the anchor point (=100). Any value above 100 indicates growth relative to 2022/23, while any value below 100 indicates a decline.
Data Sources
Data for the dashboards and definitions are drawn from the National Budget 2026/27, the Gauteng Provincial Government Budget 2026/27, and the Gauteng Provincial Governments Estimates of Expenditure for 2026/27.
Acknowledgements:
The GCRO is grateful for guidance on the data provided by the National Treasury and for being able to present a draft version of the dashboard to officials in the Gauteng Provincial Government.
Suggested citation: Sango A., Hassen E. and Mkhize T. (2026). Gauteng Budget Dashboard 2026/27. Gauteng City-Region Observatory. 3 August 2026.
Inputs, edits and comments: Christian Hamann, Dr Laven Naidoo, Dr Samkelisiwe Khanyile and Graeme Götz.