The Legislature plans to approve a final fiscal year 2026 state budget on Monday, the day before the new spending cycle starts, after House and Senate Democrats announced they reached an accord.
Rep. Aaron Michlewitz and Sen. Michael Rodrigues, the budget chiefs for each chamber, said in a statement just after 1 p.m. Friday they completed a deal on the annual spending plan. They did not release any details about its contents or even a bottom line spending figure.
Each branch this spring approved a more than $61.4 billion budget, representing a roughly 6% increase in state spending over the version Gov. Maura Healey signed last summer.
While the bottom lines were roughly similar, the House and Senate budgets differed on how much money to provide to the MBTA, other education and transportation initiatives funded by a surtax on wealthy households, the use of one-time revenues to support spending, and transfers to the health safety net program.
“With this compromise agreement, the House and Senate are doubling down on our shared commitment to addressing the underlying budget challenges that we are collectively confronting in the face of ongoing uncertainty and federal funding impacts,” Michlewitz and Rodrigues said in a joint statement. “Currently, our teams are working hard to complete the work necessary to file the conference committee report this weekend, to ensure that the Legislature is prepared to act on Monday to send a balanced and fiscally responsible budget to the Governor and her team before the beginning of the new fiscal year.”
Lawmakers also packed the bills with policy riders, and the weekend filing will reveal how they landed on whether to pause admissions reforms at vocational and technical schools, whether to give up some state control over alcohol licenses, and whether regulators can cap prices for some prescription medications.
The House and Senate are largely pressing ahead with spending plans crafted before the extent of changes at the federal level became more apparent.
Final approval of the state budget is now likely to occur before Congress completes its work on a massive spending, tax and policy bill. That legislation remains pending in the U.S. Senate.
If Republicans in Washington, D.C. follow through on their goals of cutting spending on Medicaid and other programs, it could force Gov. Maura Healey to make significant changes to the state budget down the line.
Fiscal year 2026 begins Tuesday, July 1. Massachusetts has not had a new state budget signed into law before the start of the fiscal year in a decade and a half.
Michlewitz and Rodrigues’s announcement tees up legislative approval of a new budget on fiscal new year’s eve, though the state is almost certain not to have a spending plan officially in place by the time FY 2026 begins because Healey gets 10 days to review any bill sent to her desk.
Healey on Monday filed a $7.5 billion interim budget designed to keep state government funded, and avoid any lapses in paychecks, programs or services, for about another month in the absence of an annual spending plan. The Legislature broke for a long weekend without taking up that stopgap measure.
Spokespeople for both House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka said Friday their branches will approve the interim budget Monday.
If the Legislature enacts the fiscal 2026 budget Monday as planned, it would be the earliest in the calendar lawmakers sent an annual budget to the governor since 2016, when they also voted on June 30.
House and Senate Democrats for years have extended budget talks into the new fiscal year and kept government funded with holdover budgets, at times producing some of the latest annual budgets in the nation.
The last time a governor signed an annual state budget into law before the start of the fiscal year was in 2010.
The difference in spending between the House and Senate budgets is $70.3 million or about 0.11%, the Mass. Taxpayers Foundation said before cautioning that there is also nearly $1 billion in unique spending across the two bills especially in areas like health care, education, support services and economic development.
“The House budget includes $437 million in spending not reflected in the Senate budget, while the Senate budget includes $522 million in spending not adopted by the House,” MTF said in a report last week.
MTF said that the six-person conference committee, should it attempt to fund every dollar called for in the House and Senate budgets, could find itself as much as $769 million short if budget-writers have only MTF’s minimum estimate for budget revenues available to them.
“At a high-level, the House and Senate budgets share many similarities that would ordinarily suggest swift conference resolution: both bills exclude the tax policy proposals put forward by the administration, spend less than the Governor by at least $500 million, and reflect a limited number of substantive policy proposals,” the report said. “However, despite these shared elements, budget conferees are still tasked with reconciling nearly $1 billion in unique spending priorities, a resource gap that could exceed $750 million, and notable policy differences related to pharmaceutical cost controls and admissions policies at vocational technical high schools.”
The budget deal is the first piece of legislation subject to newly reformed joint rules the House and Senate adopted Thursday. One provision in the new package requires a gap of at least 24 hours between the filing of a conference report and acceptance of it in the House and Senate, which would require the budget deal to be submitted to the House clerk’s office by about Sunday afternoon for action to take place Monday.
Under the new rules, if a report is filed later than 8 p.m. though, it cannot be considered the following day.
