The “Transparent Cities” program conducted a comprehensive assessment of public finance transparency in 11 largest cities of Ukraine according to European standards. As a result of the study, which took place in March 2026, no city was able to exceed the mark of 60 points out of a possible 100, while the average score for the selected cities was only 44.4%. These results indicate significant issues with the openness of local budgets and public access to key information.
This is reported by Finway
Leaders and outsiders in the budget transparency ranking
Among all surveyed cities, Dnipro showed the best result with 60 points. Next is Lutsk with 57 points, while Kyiv and Khmelnytskyi received 52 each. At the bottom of the ranking are Chernihiv (21 points), Poltava (24), and Kharkiv (25). At the same time, experts note that even the leaders of the ranking demonstrated strengths only in certain areas.
For instance, Dnipro and Kyiv excelled in budget planning accuracy and effective operation within the Prozorro.Sales system, but did not provide full public access to important financial documents. Lutsk and Khmelnytskyi, although they qualitatively filled the budget sections on their official websites, did not achieve an adequate level of effectiveness in financial and asset management. None of the municipalities demonstrated a comprehensive approach to transparency.
“The main problem is not the absence of documents, but their inaccessibility and lack of dialogue with the community.”
Main shortcomings and features of budget transparency
Experts emphasize that the critical shortcoming remains not so much the lack of information, but its complicated accessibility for city residents and the absence of communication with the community. No city published a complete list of citizens’ proposals for the budget project. In 10 out of 11 cities, the protocols of public hearings were not published in the designated sections of the websites, and announcements of such hearings could only be found in five cities. Also, no municipality published reports on the implementation of budget program passports on the Open Budget portal.
The situation in Poltava, Kharkiv, and Chernihiv is even worse — these cities do not have structured budget sections on their official resources at all, which made it impossible to receive a positive assessment on several criteria. In particular, information about the budget in Kharkiv is scattered across 73 separate pages with links.
Despite the overall problems, a positive trend has been that most cities achieved high accuracy in budget planning, corresponding to the international PEFA standard category “A”. The average deviation of actual revenues from planned ones was only 3.08%, which is considered a good result even under difficult conditions. An exception was Kharkiv, where the shortfall in revenue and expenditure plans exceeded 14% due to the untimely receipt of state subsidies for metro construction.
The study also showed that the proximity of a city to a combat zone is not a determining factor for effective financial management. For example, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia met more procurement and asset management criteria than Chernihiv, which is in similar security conditions.
Procurement, asset management, and analysts’ recommendations
All 11 cities implemented a hierarchy of purchasers in the BI module of Prozorro and use Prozorro.Sales for municipal property rental auctions. However, only eight cities conducted land auctions through the electronic system, and small privatization in Kropyvnytskyi and Chernihiv was not carried out at all.
The average Procurement Index for the analyzed cities was 36.4, with Kyiv receiving the highest score of 40.1, and Lviv the lowest at 32.2. The competitiveness of procurement remains low: on average, there are fewer than two participants per procedure.
The situation in Lutsk deserves special attention — despite relatively high scores for openness, the audit of state finances for 2020–2025 revealed significant violations. This confirms the main conclusion of the study: transparency is an important condition, but it is not enough for full financial control — constant oversight and effective auditing are needed.
