Harrisburg, PA – Today, Governor Josh Shapiro delivered remarks before signing the 2026-27 Budget into law — a balanced budget that secures many of the investments the Governor called for in his 2026 Budget Address — investing in our schools, growing our economy, expanding our workforce, making our communities safer, and more.
See below for Governor Shapiro’s remarks as prepared for delivery:
Thank you all for joining us here today.
Lieutenant Governor Davis.
Speaker McClinton. Leader Bradford. Chairman Harris.
Leader Costa. Chairman Hughes.
All the members of the General Assembly who join us here today, thank you for your hard work to get this budget to my desk.
To the members of my cabinet who join us, thank you – and a special thanks to my Chief of Staff Dana Fritz…
Our outstanding Legislative Affairs Secretary TJ Yablonski who did an extraordinary amount of shuttle diplomacy over the past couple of months…
Our incredible Budget Secretary Zach Reber – who is donning his budget day attire – a green suit and green dollar sign tie….
And to the rest the staff from our legislative, legal, budget, and policy teams who have worked long hours behind the scenes to help us get this done.
In just a few moments, I’m going to sign this budget – the fourth bipartisan budget I’ll sign as your Governor.
Back in 2023, when I took my oath of office, I laid out my principles and priorities.
I promised to hold the good people of Pennsylvania as my North Star…
To bring a Get Shit Done attitude to government…
And to make it my driving purpose, every single day, to deliver for the good people of Pennsylvania.
This is the fourth year in a row where – despite working with one of the only divided legislatures in the country, where we have some really profound differences – we stayed at the table and brought Democrats and Republicans together to get stuff done, again.
252 members voted on this budget. 211 voted yes. Only 41 voted no. That shows we found consensus.
We managed to find compromise – without compromising our core values.
I’m proud to say that if you go back and look at the goals we set way back in 2023 – funding our schools, making communities safer, growing our economy…
Four years later, this budget reflects those priorities.
Because of our work together, Pennsylvania is on the rise.
We’ve reduced violent crime by 16 percent and homicides are down 39 percent.
We’ve put nearly 2,000 more cops on our streets to keep people safe.
Graduation rates and test scores are up while truancy is down – and more young people are finding their passion in the trades.
We’ve spurred record economic growth by creating over 24,000 jobs and securing over $41 billion in private sector investment – more than the previous 15 years, combined.
We have the only growing economy in the Northeast, and last week, we jumped four spots on CNBC’s “Top States for Business” rankings – the highest Pennsylvania has been ranked in 15 years – and working with the private sector, we created more jobs than all but two states in the entire country.
As Democrats and Republicans stated on the floor today, we’re in an incredibly strong fiscal position here in Pennsylvania.
This past year, we conservatively estimated that our revenues would grow by about 2%.
But thanks to the smart investments we’re making and the taxes we are cutting, our economy actually grew at 5.4% – which netted us $1.1 billion more in revenues than estimated.
This allowed us to make important investments in this budget, and still have an $8 billion surplus at the end of the 2026-27 fiscal year.
And this is the fourth budget in a row where we cut taxes. We didn’t raise them.
There’s a lot in this budget that we can all be proud of.
This year, we’re investing $11.8 billion in education – that’s a more than $678 million increase this year and over $3 billion more than the day I took office.
We’ve grown special education funding by 15%.
Today, with this budget, we’re investing $193 million in workforce development and CTE – that’s a 60% increase from four years ago.
But to me a quality education doesn’t just require dollars and cents, it also requires common sense.
Common sense suggests kids need more time to play and socialize – and interact with one another.
That’s why I’m proud the legislature passed something I called for in my Budget Address:
To require schools to give all students from Kindergarten to 5th grade 30 minutes of recess each day.
And it’s not just K-12, we’re investing more in higher education – through a new performance-based funding formula developed under the leadership of a bipartisan group chaired by House Minority Leader Jesse Topper.
That’s something leaders here in Harrisburg have talked about for years.
We got it done together.
We’re also covering $78.1 million of debt for PASSHE, enabling them to pour that money into their faculty and students, rather than spending it on interest payments.
We're also making strategic investments in higher ed to address critical workforce shortages –
Increasing the amount of funding available for GROW PA scholarships for students pursuing high-demand careers.
Last week, when I visited Big Boy in Altoona, a young woman came over to thank me as one of the first recipients of the Grow PA program.
She’s now pursuing her dream of being a health care professional in a community that needs more health care access.
And it’s not just health care providers, this budget increases our commitment to student teacher stipends from $30 million to $40 million which will allow us to fund another 3,000 aspiring teachers.
We’re investing $5 million more into recruitment and retention bonuses for child care workers so that we can raise minimum payments by nearly a hundred bucks each...
And new funding for an initiative we created last year to train more nurses, providing tuition assistance to nursing students and setting them up with a hospital placement when they graduate.
This was a priority for our good friend Bridget Kosierowski – grateful for her leadership and we all wish her well.
We’re not just paving the way for people to get into the careers they love – we’re about to pave a whole bunch of roads in Pennsylvania.
During the course of my Administration, we’ve paved more than 20,500 miles of roads and repaired nearly 1,900 state and local bridges.
By the way, we repaired more structurally deficient bridges over the first two years of my Administration than all but one other state.
This budget builds on that work and drives out an additional $775 million from the Motor License Fund to fund shovel-ready projects to repair state roads over the next 18 months.
Together, we launched an important new initiative to create an innovation fund to build on our momentum in industries like the life sciences by supporting our startups and helping them grow in Pennsylvania.
I want to thank Representative Tim Briggs, Senator Hughes, and Senator Santarsiero for their advocacy.
This budget makes $125 million available to provide capital for start-ups, fund clinical trials for the life sciences, and develop a workforce and education pipeline to help these companies succeed.
But this budget is more than a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet.
It also delivers commonsense solutions to real problems Pennsylvanians face.
Starting with our fruit growers – who are struggling to meet their bottom lines after one of the worst freeze events seen in generations devastated crops that were just starting to bloom in April.
Secretary Russell Redding and I have spent a lot of time on our farms with our ag leaders here in the General Assembly – Senators Vogel and Schwank, Representatives Moul and Pashinski.
We all heard firsthand from growers who expect to lose close to 100% of their crops for the season.
This budget delivers $10 million in much needed relief for them.
This budget also solves a problem folks have talked about for years by enabling Secretary Arkoosh and the Department of Human Services to acquire and roll out chip-enabled SNAP benefit cards – a policy Representative Dan Williams has been pushing for.
That’s an important protection against fraud, and we’re finally going to get it done.
Here’s another problem we’re solving – delivering more support for Pennsylvanians struggling with their mental health.
Last year, 988 handled more than 145,000 calls from Pennsylvanians looking for help.
This budget provides dedicated state funding for 988, to ensure that when Pennsylvanians pick up the phone to get help – a trained professional is waiting to answer.
This budget also supports our walk-in crisis centers — the places that often handle our most difficult cases.
All of this builds on the investments we’ve made in county mental health services — recognizing that they are on the front lines of this work.
A special thanks to Representative Mike Schlossberg for being our collective conscience on this important issue.
Earlier this year, I visited with the staff at a rape crisis center in Pittsburgh.
I heard them when they spoke about how hard it is to provide essential services to support victims of rape and sexual assault on a tight budget.
And I’m proud to say this budget delivers a much-needed $12 million increase for rape crisis centers all across our Commonwealth.
This budget also strengthens our child welfare system by driving out an additional $50 million to ensure counties have the resources to hold abusers accountable and keep our kids safe…
While at the same time investing to enhance ChildLine to provide real help to families who are trying their best.
And just like it invests in protecting our kids, this budget invests in protecting our seniors – with increased funding for the Department of Aging’s monitoring system – CAPE – which holds AAAs accountable, as well as increased funding to implement the Aging Our Way strategic plan.
On top of that, we’re providing more support and stability to nursing homes across the Commonwealth by increasing their minimum reimbursement rates – and that investment comes with a stricter requirement that they drive more dollars to the bedside for patient care and better pay for workers, which was a priority for Secretary Arkoosh.
Folks have talked about investing in the care of our parents and grandparents – and paying the people who do that important work better – for a long time.
We finally got it done.
At the same time we’re taking care of our kids and our seniors, in this budget we’re also taking care of our public servants – the retired cops, teachers, fire fighters, and state workers who served our Commonwealth.
This is the year when we finally come together to give them a cost of living adjustment – for the first time in more than two decades.
Let me give you an example of how this has affected one of our neighbors.
George Magaro was a firefighter with Bethlehem Local 735 for 31 years before he retired in 2000.
He literally ran into danger to keep his fellow Pennsylvanians safe.
But since 2002 – for 24 years – he’s been stuck on a fixed income, because his pension hasn’t gone up once.
Because of our work together, George and retirees like him will see an additional $300 per month – putting $3,600 per year back into their pockets.
This has been a problem I’ve heard about since I was knocking on doors running for the state house way back in 2004.
And this year, we finally came together to get it done.
Just like we came together to give seniors the largest property tax cut in 2 decades, triple the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, continue lowering our Corporate Net Income Tax for the fourth straight year, and once again deliver a Working Pennsylvania Tax Credit for nearly 200,000 of our neighbors.
These were problems folks had been trying to fix for decades.
Together, we got it done.
To be sure, many good things in this budget are going to help the good people of Pennsylvania.
And as I said in the beginning, I knew there would have to be compromises.
But because we kept at it and held out for the best possible compromise, there are a lot of bad things that would have hurt Pennsylvanians that we kept off the table.
I was adamant that there would be no cuts to Medicaid services.
I insisted that every single dollar of adequacy funding be in the final product.
And we stayed at the table to deliver a budget that builds on all the progress we’ve made, and doesn’t undercut it.
There’s a lot of work ahead, and there’s more I want to do – like raising the minimum wage, funding mass transit, and expanding access to affordable housing.
But once again, we’ve proven that here in Pennsylvania we can bring people together to solve problems, get stuff done, and build on the foundation we’ve laid.
We’ve got to keep moving forward – because what we’re doing? It’s working.
We’ve got more cops and less crime.
We’ve got more teachers in our schools and less hunger among our students.
We’ve got more Pennsylvanians on the job and less red tape holding them back.
I promised to swing wide the doors of opportunity for every Pennsylvanian who chooses to step through them – and I’m proud to do that work each and every day alongside you.
This budget continues that progress.
Thank you.