Berlin used to fill the gap with savings. Now it borrows.
27 October 2026
Berlin publishes its whole budget as open data: 27,000 lines a year, every euro the state and its twelve districts plan to spend. Almost nobody reads it, because it is 27,000 lines a year.
So I turned it into dots. Scroll, and they will rearrange to show where the money comes from, where it goes, and what changed.
€45.1 billionThis is Berlin’s budget for 2026, everything the state and its twelve districts plan to spend.
Each dot is €10 million. There are 4,509 of them.
Split evenly, that is €11,555 for every person in Berlin, babies included. The highlighted dot, €10 million, is what 865 Berliners pay for in a year.
Your household’s share:
Most of the money comes from taxes: €29.3 billion, mainly Berlin’s share of income tax and VAT, plus the trade tax its businesses pay.
Grants from the federal government and others add €8 billion.
And €4 billion is borrowed.
About one euro in every eleven that Berlin plans to spend in 2026 is new debt.
That is new. Each budget has a gap between what comes in and what goes out. These columns show how Berlin filled it.
In 2022 and 2023 it mostly took the money from reserves, savings built up in the good years before.
Then the reserves shrank. By 2025 the city planned to take only €0.9 billion from them.
Borrowing took their place: from €0.1 billion in 2023 to €3.5 billion in 2025 and €4 billion in 2026.
Debt costs money. Interest payments rise from €1.1 billion in 2022 to €1.6 billion in 2027, an increase of 45 percent.
By 2027 Berlin plans to pay more in interest than for its entire fire brigade and all of its culture combined.
So where does the money go?
The biggest share, €12.3 billion, goes to schools, universities and culture. Almost as much, €12 billion, goes to social security: benefits, youth welfare, support for people with disabilities.
The darker dots pay people: teachers, police officers, judges, tax officials, and the pensions of those who have retired.
That is €13.1 billion, or €29 of every €100. In administration, police and justice it is most of the budget.
In 2025 the budget had a hole in it.
Parliament approved €43.5 billion of spending, but €2.1 billion of it was a promise to cut without saying where. The budget calls these “pauschale Minderausgaben”: the departments had to find the money during the year.
In the 2026 plan, some of those cuts have names.
Culture loses €83 million, 8 percent. Public transport loses €414 million, 15 percent; part of that is a one-off €300 million payment to BVG in 2025 that is not repeated.
At the same time Berlin plans to invest more than ever: €6 billion in 2026, up from €3.8 billion in 2022.
A growing part is loans for new housing, €1.1 billion in 2026, and money from the federal infrastructure fund, €0.5 billion.
This is all of it again, coloured by what it pays for.
Every one of the 27,000 lines is searchable in the budget explorer, including the twelve districts per resident.
What the numbers are
Every figure is a planned amount from the budget plans for 2022/23, 2024/25 and 2026/27, the “Soll” that parliament approves. What was actually spent is not in the open data, so years that are over may have ended differently.
Payments between the state and its districts are left out so nothing is counted twice. Taxes are income groups 0, borrowing is group 32, reserves group 35. Interest is spending groups 57 and 58. Staff is spending group 4, which includes pensions. Investment is groups 7 and 8, which include loans. The dots for purposes and staff show spending before the unnamed cuts, €45.4 billion in 2026; the €45.1 billion at the top is after them.
Some lines move between chapters from one budget to the next. The Charité and part of the university staff costs did in 2026, which makes the universities look cut when they are not. I checked every comparison here against that.
The data comes from the Senatsverwaltung für Finanzen Berlin under CC BY 4.0, published as linked data on GitHub. Population is from the Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg, 30 June 2025.
How it was made
Same afternoon pattern as the empty lots map, built with Claude Code. The data build parses two million facts from the budget file into one table. Eight chapters that are new in 2026 had no name in any dataset, so their names came out of the printed budget PDFs. The dots are one canvas and about 300 lines of code.
The budget explorer is an experiment from my lab, supercharged.sh.