Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday, February 1, presented the Union Budget for the financial year 2026–27. This was her ninth Budget in a row and the third full Budget of the Modi 3.0 government. The Finance Minister spoke in Parliament for 1 hour and 25 minutes, which comes to a total of 85 minutes.
How long did the Budget speech last this year?
This year’s Budget speech matched the length of her 2024 address. It was neither her shortest nor her longest, but stayed close to her recent addressing pattern in Parliament. In 2025, Nirmala Sitharaman’s Budget speech lasted 1 hour and 17 minutes.
That Budget focused on relief measures for taxpayers. In 2024, her speech once again ran for 1 hour and 25 minutes, the same duration as this year. The Interim Budget of 2024 stands out for a different reason. It was her shortest Budget speech so far, lasting just 56 minutes. That was also her sixth consecutive Budget as Finance Minister.
Longer budget speeches in the past
In 2023, the Budget presentation wrapped up in 87 minutes.
In 2022, Sitharaman spoke for 92 minutes, crossing the one-and-a-half-hour mark.
The 2021 Budget speech lasted 1 hour and 40 minutes and marked India’s first paperless Budget. Sitharaman presented it using a tablet, carried in a traditional bahi-khata-style pouch.
The longest budget speech on record
The longest Budget speech in India’s history was delivered by Nirmala Sitharaman in 2020. She spoke for straight 2 hours and 41 minutes. During the speech, she took a little pause and later returned to complete the address after receiving medical attention.
Sitharaman’s very first Budget speech came in 2019, and it was also among the longest ever. The speech lasted 2 hours and 17 minutes and was delivered without any breaks. It included multiple languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, and Sanskrit, making it one of the most distinctive Budget presentations in Parliament.
The shortest budget speech in India’s history
The shortest Union Budget speech ever was delivered much earlier, in 1977–78, by former Finance Minister Hirubhai M. Patel. He was serving in the Morarji Desai government at the time and presented an interim Budget.
Patel’s speech was around 800 words long, making it the shortest Budget address in India’s history. While the exact time taken for the speech was never officially recorded, a speech of that length would likely have taken about five to ten minutes to deliver.
Longest budget speech by word count
When it comes to the number of words, the record is held by Manmohan Singh, who was Finance Minister in 1991 and later became Prime Minister. His historic Budget speech contained 18,650 words, making it the longest Budget speech by word count.
The second-longest speech by word count was delivered by former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in 2018, with 18,604 words.