Fjárlög — Icelandic state budget (appropriations + 5-year plan)

The forward-looking counterpart to rikisreikningur (which is actuals). Where ríkisreikningur answers "what was spent", fjárlög answers "what was appropriated / planned". The newspaper tables on defense, NATO targets, etc. are drawn from here — specifically from the fjármálaáætlun (5-year fiscal plan) and the annual fjárlagafrumvarp (budget bill), published by Fjármála- og efnahagsráðuneytið on stjornarradid.is.

Source

Per budget year there is a "Skjöl og gögn" page, e.g. https://www.stjornarradid.is/verkefni/opinber-fjarmal/fjarlog/fjarlog-fyrir-arid-2026/skjol-og-gogn/

It links PDFs (frumvarp, samþykkt fjárlög, fylgirit) and one machine-readable CSV: "Talnagögn úr fjárlagafrumvarpi". That single CSV is the whole budget at the level Alþingi appropriates it, and it is what this skill targets.

• Filename carries a version suffix that changes between revisions (… - 003.csv), so the script discovers the link from the page HTML rather than hard-coding it (regex on href=".*[Tt]alnag.*\.csv").
• Sibling pages: fjarmalaaaetlun/fjarmalaaaetlun-2026-2030/skjol-og-gogn/ (the 5-year plan), and …/fjarlog-fyrir-arid-{Y}/fylgirit/ for the PDF "Yfirlit 3 — Fjárveitingar eftir málaflokkum og ráðuneytum".

No API key, no auth. Plain file download over HTTPS.

CSV schema (semicolon-delimited, UTF-8 BOM)

Column	Meaning
Ár	year
Afurð	data product — see below
FlokkunNy	(mostly empty; new-classification flag)
Málefnasvið	policy area, "04 Utanríkismál" (01–36)
Málaflokkur	policy sub-area, "04.30 Samstarf um öryggis- og varnarmál"
Ráðuneyti	ministry, "02 Utanríkisráðuneyti"
Liður	institution group
Viðfang	appropriation item, "101 Varnarmál"
TegundNota	view discriminator — see below
Upphæð	amount in m.kr (millions ISK)

One file spans four Afurð products in one long table:

Afurð	Years (in 2026 file)	Meaning
Ríkisreikningur	2024	final state-accounts actuals (outturn)
Fjárlög	2025	enacted budget, prior year
Frumvarp	2026	the budget bill for the budget year
Áætlun	2027–2028	fiscal-plan projection

TegundNota is a view, never sum across it

The same money appears under several TegundNota values. Pick one; do not add them up:

• Gjöld / Heildarútgjöld — gross expenditure (use for "spending")
• Tekjur / Rekstrartekjur — revenue / own-revenue (sértekjur)
• Greiðsla / Fjárhæð — net cash / net appropriation
• Rekstrarframlög + Rekstrartilfærslur + Fjárfestingarframlög (+ Fjármagnstilfærslur) — the funding-component breakdown that sums to Heildarútgjöld

Defense — the worked example

Defense is málaflokkur 04.30 "Samstarf um öryggis- og varnarmál" (viðfang 101 Varnarmál + 601 Tæki og búnaður), under the Utanríkisráðuneyti.

uv run python scripts/fjarlog.py mala 04.30        # Gjöld, all products

Year	Afurð	Gjöld (m.kr)
2024	Ríkisreikningur (actual)	6,553
2025	Fjárlög (enacted)	6,821
2026	Frumvarp (bill)	10,404

The 2026 bill figure (10.4 bn) matches the press characterisation of "bein útgjöld til varnar- og öryggismála … um 10,6 milljörðum … 0,22% af VLF".

⚠️ The broad "varnar- og öryggismál" 0,9 %-of-GDP aggregate is NOT this line. That ~43–53 bn / 0.88–1.00 % series (Minnisblað fjármála- og efnahagsráðuneytis, A1 + A3 + C-hluti + sveitarfélög) is a bespoke cross-cutting construct: it folds in parts of the coast guard (09.20 Landhelgi), civil defence (almannavarnir), cyber/network defence and airport/harbour readiness on top of 04.30. It cannot be reproduced by summing a single málaflokkur, and it lives only in the ministry memo, not in this CSV. The raw heimamundur ledger in rikisreikningur slices 04.30 by economic type and yields a smaller ~3.2 bn — that is an artefact of how grant-funded operations are booked, not the headline defense number. Use the budget CSV's Gjöld (6.55 bn for 2024) as the official figure.

Usage

uv run python scripts/fjarlog.py fetch                 # download + tidy → data/processed/fjarlog.parquet
uv run python scripts/fjarlog.py fetch --year 2026     # choose budget-year page
uv run python scripts/fjarlog.py products              # afurð × year coverage
uv run python scripts/fjarlog.py mala 04.30            # one málaflokkur across years (Gjöld)
uv run python scripts/fjarlog.py mala 04.30 --tegund Heildarútgjöld

Processed output data/processed/fjarlog.parquet columns: ar, afurd, flokkun_ny, malefnasvid, malefnasvid_nr, malaflokkur, malaflokkur_nr, raduneyti, lidur, vidfang, tegund, mkr. Query with DuckDB:

duckdb -c "SELECT ar, afurd, SUM(mkr)/1000 AS bn FROM 'data/processed/fjarlog.parquet'
           WHERE tegund='Gjöld' GROUP BY 1,2 ORDER BY 1"   -- total spending by year

The fylgirit "Yfirlit" CSV exports (alternative source)

The interactive dashboard / fylgirit also lets you export each overview as its own CSV. These are SSRS report dumps — raw Textbox### column names, repeated group-header columns, dotted-leader padding ("Alþingi . . . ."), 3-line preamble — far messier than the single Talnagögn CSV above. Use Talnagögn for programmatic work; reach for these only for cross-check or the revenue side.

Export	Content	Verdict
Yfirlit 2	2026 appropriations by economic split (rekstur/tilfærslur/fjárfesting)	duplicate of Talnagögn
Yfirlit 3	2024–2028 by ráðuneyti → málaflokkur → ríkisaðili → viðfang, 5 year columns wide	best cross-check; extends plan to 2028
Yfirlit 4	2026 appropriations by ríkisaðili (entity)	duplicate
Sundurliðun Tekna (Yfirlit 1)	A1 REVENUE side: tax lines (income tax, VAT…), álagt (assessed) vs greiðsla (cash), 4 years	not in Talnagögn — the only additive file

Validation (2025-06): Yfirlit 3 reproduces Talnagögn exactly — defense 04.30 = 6,553.3 / 6,820.9 / 10,404.3 m.kr (2024/25/26) and grand total Samtals útgjöld 2024 = 1,491,095.1 m.kr both match. Yfirlit 3 additionally gives plan years 2027 = 11,403.1 and 2028 = 9,915.3 m.kr for defense.

Revenue gap: the Talnagögn CSV / fjarlog.parquet only carries per-málaflokkur own-revenue (sértekjur, ≤~19 bn rows), not the A1 macro tax revenue (income tax ~304 bn, VAT ~465 bn). For the revenue side use Sundurliðun Tekna. Parsing it means: skip 3 preamble lines, take leaf rows by revenue key (111 income/profit tax, 112 payroll, 113 property, 114 goods & services/VAT…), columns alagt{n}/greidsla{n} are assessed-vs-cash per year.

Caveats

1. mkr is millions ISK. Divide by 1000 for billions. Number format varies by revision (dot-decimal 6381.1 in the current file; older revisions used comma-decimal 6.381,1) — the script normalises both.
2. Never sum across TegundNota (see above). Filter to one view first.
3. Year coverage shifts with each budget edition: the 2026 file gives 2024 actual → 2028 plan. Re-fetch to roll the window forward; pass --year to target a specific edition's page.
4. Gross vs net. Gjöld/Heildarútgjöld are gross of own-revenue; the málaflokkur-level totals are before inter-entity eliminations, so the project-wide sum (~1,491 bn for 2024) runs above the consolidated ríkisreikningur expenditure (~1,245 bn).
5. Defense definition. 04.30 = direct defense only. The 0.9 %-of-GDP "varnar- og öryggismál" aggregate is a separate ministry construct (see the worked example above).
6. Discovery fallback. If the page layout changes and the CSV link can't be found, the script falls back to a hard-coded 2026 URL and prints a warning — re-point _FALLBACK_CSV if needed.

Related

• rikisreikningur — actuals (outturn); pairs with this skill's plan/appropriations
• opnirreikningar — invoice-level government spending
• hagstofan — GFS-standard fiscal aggregates (THJ tables), GDP (VLF) for %-of-GDP ratios