PIOM's Pension Fund Gap Has Nearly Doubled in Three Years — to €1 Billion a Year

The state pension fund PIOM spends around €2.4 billion a year on pensions, while collecting only about €1.4 billion from employee contributions — a gap of roughly €1 billion that the Budget covers every year. The figures were confirmed by Social Policy Minister Goko Velkovski on MRT 1's "360 Degrees" programme.

The gap is not new, but its size is. In 2023, the shortfall the state had to cover was about €510 million. In three years, it has nearly doubled. The transfer from the Budget to PIOM now reaches roughly 60 billion denars a year.

Part of the growing gap, the minister acknowledged, comes from linear pension increases — twice by 2,500 denars and twice by 1,000 — introduced specifically to help pensioners who were living on 12,000 to 14,000 denars a month.

"The figures are correct... but the fact remains that more than two-thirds of our fellow citizens were below the minimum or on the minimum pension," Velkovski said in defence of the decision, without offering a concrete calculation or timeline for when and how the budget dependency will shrink.

Opposition party SDSM wants a written answer from the government: which measures, by what date, and from where exactly the gap will be closed. The ruling side says the fund is stable and that pensions have risen by a combined 7,000 denars in under two years. The two claims are not mutually exclusive — stability "now" and a growing dependency "every year" can both be true, they are just talking about different time horizons.

MKNews Hub · Economy · September 18, 2026