★ The money in FY2025 outturn · on-budget basis Four institutions counting one year
Where Liberia's money comes from
Domestic taxes beat their FY2025 target. The donors did not, and an IMF loan covered the year's small deficit.
Four institutions publish a count of the same year — the ministry, the revenue authority, the IMF and the OECD. This page reads one fiscal year against the documents that printed it; Compare takes the longer view.
Approved against collected, FY2025
MFDP · ON-BUDGET · US$The hollow bar is the revenue the approved budget assumed; the filled bar is what arrived. Warm means over target, cool means under.
The envelope held because domestic taxpayers over-delivered. Tax revenue came in above target, more than covering a shortfall in external resources and the complete non-appearance of in "contingent" revenue that had been written into the budget.
Who collects it, and four counts of one year
LRA · MFDP · IMF · OECD/ATAFThe Liberia Revenue Authority collects the taxes and most of the non-tax revenue; the Ministry of Finance books what reaches the Consolidated Fund; the IMF and the OECD/ATAF each re-count it on their own definitions. Four institutions, one year, four numbers.
FY2025 domestic revenue, US$M
FY2024 domestic revenue, US$M
The year-end press figure is never the outturn. The LRA announced for 2025 two days before the year closed; its final figure, stated eight months later, was . Its own annual report, published later still, prints — the ministry's figure to the thousand. They are counting the same money, from the same tax administration system. The IMF's is a staff estimate made before the books closed. For 2024 the spread across the published counts shown is .
The preliminary figure is the one that stuck. The announced on 29 December 2025 was carried by every outlet that covered the year and has not been revised in the public record since. The LRA's own correction to — published by the LRA itself, in the press release of 20 August 2026 quoted below — was not. A reader who checks the number against the news finds the preliminary; a reader who checks it against the documents finds the outturn. Both LRA releases are in the archive, and the difference between them is logged as D14.
How gross collections become revenue
FY2020/21, US$. came off the tax system's gross reading in the two years a reconciliation was published, and none has been published since. Both sheets are in the archive.
Where the LRA can say it collected
The only county-attributed collections the LRA publishes are its tax business offices for small and micro taxpayers: in FY2023 across fourteen counties, of the year's domestic revenue. Everything else is collected at headquarters, at the port or at the large-taxpayer division, and is attributed to no county — the mirror image of a budget that codes 92% of spending "nationwide". See the counties →
Tax revenue by type
TABLE 6 · P.28Income and trade taxes carried the year. The goods-and-services tax — the base for the planned VAT — fell well short.
The report's own Table 5 misstates the tax variance by US$404k and the non-tax variance by US$781k; Table 6 prints the correct figures and is what is shown here. D1, D2 →
Non-tax revenue by type
TABLE 6 · P.28Property income — royalties, rents, maritime and concession receipts — is the bulk of non-tax revenue and slightly missed target; fees and fines made up the difference.
Two lines print no approved figure at all (sales of goods and services; miscellaneous). They are shown against a zero target, as the source does.
External resources: who showed up
TABLE 7 · P.29What the budget expected from each financier, and what was actually received. "Domestic financing" is borrowing the ministry groups under external resources; it was not drawn because domestic revenue over-performed.
World Bank budget support of disbursed nothing in FY2025. The European Union over-delivered and the IMF disbursed that had not been budgeted. Net, external resources arrived at of plan.
The same US$40 million reappears in the FY2026 supplementary budget, carried forward as undisbursed support. As drafted, it sat alongside of FY2025's domestic over-performance in a supplement to a budget; as enacted, a further of World Bank support took the supplement to .
The report's Table 7 computes its variance column with the World Food Programme line excluded and folds that amount into the EU row — two of the six arithmetic errors logged for this document. Figures shown are the printed receipts, recomputed. D3, D4 →
Two ways to count the same revenue
BASIS MATTERSOn the ministry's on-budget basis, FY2025 revenue was . On the IMF's central-government basis it was . The gap is off-budget project grants and loans that finance donor projects directly and never enter the appropriation. Neither figure is wrong; they answer different questions, and Liberia Ledger stores the basis on every row so the two are never summed.
Central-government revenue and grants, by source
US$M. FY2025 is an IMF staff estimate; FY2026 a programme projection. Caps show the total and its share of nominal GDP.
The wider picture: output and public debt
IMF · CR 26/98 · TABLE 4APublic debt, US$M, and its share of GDP
Nominal GDP and revenue effort
Revenue effort is central-government revenue and grants over nominal GDP. Debt service — domestic and foreign liabilities together — absorbed of the FY2025 on-budget appropriation, more than the entire health or education sector. See spending →
One year is not the argument
The twelve-year tax structure, the cost of the exemptions written against it, and Liberia set beside sixteen West African economies — on the sources that measure every country the same way.