Bulgarian government votes Christmas bonus for pensioners paid lowest-level pensions
Bulgaria’s Cabinet agreed on November 20 2019 to pay a Christmas bonus of 40 leva (about 20 euro) to pensioners who get monthly pensions of less than 363 leva, Labour and Social Policy Minister Bisser Petkov said.
The bonuses will go to 1 276 200 pensioners and will cost state coffers about 51 million leva. The funds will come from restructuring of the state budget.
For several years, it has been the practice of a succession of Bulgarian governments to pay bonuses to pensioners at Easter and Christmas. In recent years, the sum each pensioner gets as a bonus has been about 40 leva.
In November 2018, Prime Minister Boiko Borissov said that with the sum approved at a Cabinet meeting that month, his third government had provided more than 200 million leva (about 100 million euro) in pension supplements.
Over the course of his three governments, close to half a billion leva had been allocated to bonuses to low-income pensioners at Christmas and Easter, Borissov said at the time.
(Photo: Clive Leviev-Sawyer)
