knbs ke.knbs.government-expense-economic.annual annual

National Government Expense by Economic Type.

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VERSION v2026-08-20

UPDATED 17d ago

CHECKED 1d ago

COVERAGE 2019 - 2024

SHAPE 204 × 8

SIZE 7.5 KB

FREQUENCY annual

PIPELINE automated

LICENSE Not stated

SOURCE www.knbs.or.ke

What Kenya's national government spent, by economic type, for the six fiscal years to 2024/25. 204 observations: 34 rows across six years, covering compensation of employees, use of goods and services, subsidies, interest, grants, social benefits and other expense, with the four largest of those broken into their own components.

Debt interest has passed the public wage bill. In 2019/20 the government spent KSh 536.9 billion on staff and KSh 437.2 billion on interest; in 2024/25 it spent KSh 650.0 billion on staff and KSh 995.8 billion on interest. The two series crossed in 2021/22, and in 2020/21 they were 819 million shillings apart. Interest is the fastest growing line here, 2.28 times its 2019/20 level against 1.54 for expense as a whole, and it has gone from 17.6 per cent of expense to 26.0 while compensation of employees fell from 21.6 to 17.0. Subsidies went the other way, ending at 41 per cent of where they started.

This is expense, not expenditure: it excludes what the government spent on assets, which is ke.knbs.capital-expenditure.annual, and the two together are ke.knbs.government-outlays.annual.

The rows are six kinds of thing and the dataset says which in item_level, because summing them all counts the same shilling up to three times. component rows are leaves. group rows are the sum of the components beneath them, so General Government Agencies is Current plus Capital and is not additive with either. block_total rows are the printed Total of the block named in parent. memo rows sit inside the row above them: Of Which County Governments is part of Current, not beside it, and adding it to the grants block overstates 2024/25 by KSh 445.6 billion. total is the printed Total Expense.

Four rows are called Total, one per block. The parent column is what tells them apart.

Fiscal years run 1 July to 30 June. 2024/25 is provisional in the source.

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DEBT AGAINST STAFF

Kenya's national government now spends half as much again on debt interest as it does on everyone it employs.

Interest against compensation of employees · KSh million · fiscal years 2019/20 to 2024/25

SOURCE: Kenya National Bureau of Statistics · National Government Expense by Economic Type (annual) · Updated 2026-08-20

#	fiscal_year	period_start	item	item_level	parent	status	value	unit
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COLUMN	TYPE	DESCRIPTION	UNIT
fiscal_year	string	Kenyan fiscal year, e.g. 2024/25, opening on 1 July	-
period_start	date	1 July of the fiscal year's first calendar year	-
item	string	Economic classification, as the source prints it	-
item_level	string	component, group, block_total, memo or total. Summing across levels double counts; see source_description for what each one means.	-
parent	string	The block or group this row sits inside, or null for the three figures and the total that sit at the top level. A block heading carries no figure of its own, so it appears here and not as a row.	-
status	string	final, revised or provisional	-
value	float64	Expense in millions of shillings	-
unit	string	ksh_million	-

CITATION · APA 7

imibare contributors. (2026). National Government Expense by Economic Type [Data set]. imibare. v2026-08-20. https://imibare.org/datasets/ke.knbs.government-expense-economic.annual