What happens on Budget day, from the Chancellor's statement to the OBR forecast
John Healey presents his first Budget to the Commons on Wednesday. The Office for Budget Responsibility publishes its new forecast once he has finished, with detailed tables following that afternoon.
By Daily Oracles News Team2 min read
Wednesday's Budget will be the first delivered by John Healey, who became Chancellor in July and set the date within a fortnight of arriving at the Treasury. He will present it in the House of Commons on 28 October, about a month earlier than many analysts had expected.
Until he stands up, most of the package is unknown. The Treasury and Downing Street have put a small number of measures on the record in advance. Everything else, including any changes to tax rates and allowances, will be heard first in the chamber.
The order of events
The Chancellor's statement comes first. Only once he has finished presenting the Budget to Parliament does the Office for Budget Responsibility release its Economic and fiscal outlook, the five-year forecast for growth, inflation, borrowing and debt that sits alongside every Budget.
The OBR has said the outlook itself will appear on its page on GOV.UK. The supplementary documents, supporting material and detailed forecast tables will go on its own website, obr.uk, in the afternoon. Jonathan Haskel, the OBR's chair, will then present the main messages of the report later the same day.
That split between two websites is new. The OBR adopted it as an interim arrangement after a publication error affected its November 2025 outlook, and in June it set out steps taken to tighten information security across forecasting and publishing.
What the forecast will show
The Chancellor commissioned the October forecast on 31 July. The OBR agreed the final details of its timetable in September and has said it will set them out in the foreword to the report. The outlook will replace the forecast published in March 2026.
For readers trying to judge what the Budget costs and who pays, the OBR document matters as much as the speech. It contains the watchdog's own estimates of how much each policy raises or costs over the forecast period, and its judgement on whether the government is on course to meet its fiscal rules. When he announced the date, Mr Healey said the Budget would be built on fiscal discipline and would meet those rules.
The government also said in July that a white paper on devolving power and money to regional mayors and strategic authorities would be published alongside the Budget, with a timetable for putting its reforms in place. Allowing mayors to keep a share of income tax and business rates was among the ideas it said the Budget would detail.
After Wednesday
The Budget is for the UK, but the devolved governments set their own spending plans once they know what they will receive. The Scottish Government publishes its budget on 3 December.
For households and businesses, the line to look for in the Treasury's documents is the start date attached to each measure, which shows when a change actually reaches pay packets, bills and prices.
