Treasury's 2026 AENE Guidelines for Departments on How to Move Money Between Budgets

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The money is already spent. The virement letter was never signed. Someone in the corridor suggests dating the approval back to July, and everyone in the room knows what that is.

National Treasury closed that door again on 11 August 2026. The 2026 Adjusted Estimates of National Expenditure (AENE) Technical Guidelines and the AENE data workbooks for the mid-year budget adjustment provide the process where departments change this year's approved budget before it goes back to Parliament on 21 October. The article sets out what's allowed, mainly moving money between programmes, rolling over unspent funds, and asking for extra money for real emergencies, and flags the traps: price increases don't count as emergencies, salary funds can't be rolled over, and shifting more than 8 per cent out of a programme needs Parliament's approval. The key point is that approval must be signed before the money is spent, no backdating is allowed, so spending first and asking later becomes irregular expenditure in your own name. Requests are due 21 August. It also matters in private practice: when a department hands back unspent money, contracts get cancelled, and the small suppliers who rely on that work feel it months later.

What Treasury actually issued

The AENE guidelines set the rules for the mid-year adjustments budget. They flow from section 30(2) of the Public Finance Management Act and sections 5 and 6 of the Appropriation Act No.10 of 2026, and they decide which changes to this year's budget Treasury will accept, how each one must be motivated, and how it must be presented in the chapter that lands in Parliament on 21 October 2026.

Ten categories of adjustment are allowed. Roll-overs, unforeseeable and unavoidable expenditure, virements and shifts, self-financing expenditure, function shifts, declared unspent funds, section 16 emergency spending, gifts and donations above R100 000 per beneficiary, and direct charges against the National Revenue Fund. Anything that does not fit one of those boxes does not get adjusted. It gets explained to the Auditor-General instead.

The dates that decide it

The calendar is short and it has already started moving. Cabinet memoranda for unforeseeable and unavoidable expenditure were due on 7 August. That deadline has passed. Every other request, virements, shifts, self-financing, expenditure announced by the Minister in February, declared unspent funds, and new transfers to institutions, must reach Treasury by 21 August 2026. Allocation letters follow on 14 September, which is also the cut-off for virements that make it into the workbooks. The chapter and workbook are due 25 September, the final version with six months of actual figures on 9 October.

Nine days. That is what stands between a department's finance team and a request that will not be considered.

Where the applications fail

Treasury Regulation 6.6.1 disqualifies most of what departments like to call unforeseeable. Expenditure that was known when the estimates were finalised but could not be squeezed in does not qualify. Neither do tariff adjustments or price increases. Neither does extending a service you already run.

Roll-overs are tighter than most people remember. Compensation of employees cannot be rolled over at all. Goods and services roll-overs are capped at 5 per cent of the department's budget for that item. Capital roll-overs only work for projects and assets already in progress.

Virements from a main division cannot cumulatively exceed 8 per cent of what was appropriated to it, and going past that needs Parliament, not a friendly letter. Earmarked funds, capital, financial assets and transfers all need Treasury sign-off before they move anywhere.

Then there is performance. Indicators and targets from the 2026 ENE stand as published. You may only revise a target where a technical amendment genuinely changed the output, and you have to explain the link in writing under the table. Missing a target is not grounds to lower it.

This reaches private practice too

Declared unspent funds reduce a department's appropriation. Programmes get trimmed and orders get cancelled, and the small construction firm, cleaning contractor or IT supplier on the other end finds out when the purchase order goes quiet. If you carry clients who live off government work, the AENE tables published in October are a forecast of their fourth quarter cash flow. Read them before your client asks why the December invoice was not paid.

That is billable advisory work. As Accounting Weekly set out in Prove It or Lose It: Treasury's New Budget Rules, Treasury has moved to a position where programmes that cannot show results lose their funding. The adjustments budget is where that gets applied to real rands, in the middle of the year, on paper.

Do this before 21 August

• Pull every virement and shift you have processed since April and check that a valid approval was signed before the expenditure was incurred. Fix what you can. Disclose what you cannot.

• Test each unforeseeable and unavoidable claim against Treasury Regulation 6.6.1 before you write the motivation.

• Calculate your virements as a percentage of the main division. Anything over 8 per cent needs Treasury consensus in writing and then Parliament.

• Check the roll-over items line by line. Compensation of employees is out, goods and services stops at 5 per cent.

• Get the number formatting right. Adjustment amounts run to three decimals, R2.532 million, while mid-year expenditure and receipts run to one. Chapters do come back for this.

• For practice clients dependent on state contracts, flag the 21 October tabling date now and plan the cash flow conversation.

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