The Judiciary (JUD)
Ang ikatlong sangay: mahaba ang pila ng kaso, maliit ang puwesto sa badyet.
The Judiciary is the third branch of government — funded through the national budget, but protected from it by a constitutional guarantee of fiscal autonomy. Its structure is fixed: the Supreme Court at the top, the Court of Appeals, the Sandiganbayan for graft cases, the Court of Tax Appeals, and the trial courts that handle nearly everything else. Almost all of its money is people — the salaries and benefits of justices, judges, and court personnel — because a court is, in the end, its staff.
The branch's central problem is time. Docket loads have been heavy for decades, and the courts' response over the past decade has been technical: electronic filing and case tracking, videoconferencing hearings that survived the pandemic and became ordinary, and continuing reform of procedure. None of it is free, and all of it competes for a budget that is, by the standards of the national spending picture, a sliver.
Proposed for FY2027
₱86.27B
Line items
985
Agencies
5
How it got here
The modern judiciary takes its shape from the 1987 Constitution, which did two things relevant to this page: it fixed the court structure, and it wrote fiscal autonomy into the article on the Judicial Department — appropriations that cannot be reduced below the previous year's level and are released automatically. That guarantee is why the judiciary's budget is small but predictable, and why budget season is quieter for it than for most departments. The live story is operational: backlog reduction, digitalization of records, and the slow work of getting cases to decision.
By program
6 program rows in total. Showing 6 on page 1. Switch to the table for every row on this page.
Department total ₱86,270,514,000. Rows within a page are ranked by amount; the source returns them in that order and we do not re-sort them.
What the money buys
Salaries and benefits come first: justices, judges, and the court personnel who keep records moving. Infrastructure is the second claim — the construction and repair of halls of justice, a long-running effort because many courts operate in borrowed or aging buildings. The third is the technology programme: electronic case management, digital records, and the videoconferencing systems that kept hearings running through the pandemic.
Access mechanisms round it out — court-annexed mediation and similar designs meant to settle disputes without a full trial, which is where a great many civil cases actually end.
Reading this year's proposal
Read the proposal with fiscal autonomy in mind: the numbers will not be bargained down mid-hearing the way department budgets are, so the interesting questions are internal. Is the infrastructure line building new halls of justice or mostly maintaining old ones? Is the digitalization push continuing — and does it reach the first-level courts where most Filipinos actually meet the system? Salary movements matter too, since judges' pay is one of the levers the government uses to keep good lawyers on the bench.