ATLANTA – The Georgia House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed Gov. Brian Kemp’s $37.7 billion fiscal 2026 state budget Tuesday, a spending plan that prioritizes prisons and education.
The budget, which cleared the House 171-4, is smaller than the record $40.5 billion fiscal 2025 mid-year budget lawmakers passed last week, which used $2.7 billion of the state’s $16 billion surplus. The 2026 spending plan, which takes effect July 1, does not count on surplus funding, a recognition that economic headwinds likely lie ahead.
“Things are tight,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Matt Hatchett, R-Dublin, told his legislative colleagues before Tuesday’s vote. “The needs are great, and many worthy causes are competing for the same limited resources.”
The 2026 budget includes $250 million in new spending on Georgia prisons, the subject of a federal audit last fall that criticized the prison system for failing to protect inmates from violence. To reduce the ratio of inmates to correctional officers, the spending plan authorizes hiring more than 700 guards, while providing pay raises to the current correctional staff.
The House version of the budget added $98 million in education spending above the spending recommendations Kemp presented to the General Assembly in January. Most of that increase would go toward student safety and mental health in the wake of last September’s mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County.
“School safety and mental health go hand in hand,” Hatchett said.
The budget provides $62 million for a new program called “Student Support Services.” Of that total, $19.6 million would go to hire mental health counselors for middle schools and high schools, and $28 million would go to school districts to help low-income students.
The spending plan also includes $10.8 million to hire 116 literacy coaches. Georgia students’ poor reading scores have prompted the legislature in recent years to emphasize improving literacy.
With such a large budget surplus, Kemp and the General Assembly were able to authorize a series of building projects in the current budget to be financed with cash rather than the usual practice of borrowing the money. The fiscal ’26 budget continues that practice for $545 million in projects, but the House spending plans calls for funding an additional $321 million in building projects through bonds.
The budget now moves to the state Senate.