We built a free portal that shows the 2027 budget for every district, down to the page

Gadget Pilipinas and Blip Media have published Budget Pilipinas, a free site that puts the President’s 2027 budget beside the version the House of Representatives voted on, for all 254 legislative districts. Every figure on it links to the page of the document it came from.

It is live now and needs no account. You type your district, or click it on the map, and the site shows what the National Expenditure Program gave it, what House Bill 10858 gives it, and the difference between the two.

What it actually answers

A district’s number on the site is not a summary written by us. It is the sum of the project lines that the two documents print under the offices serving that district. For the 2027 budget that is 17,613 lines of DPWH work: roads, bridges, flood control and buildings, listed project by project.

The site ranks all 254 districts by that change, so a reader can see where they sit without reading a bill. The map shades provinces, because the money is placed by DPWH office rather than by coordinates. Only 2,348 of those 17,613 lines carry a latitude and longitude, which is why the tool does not pretend to pin every project.

Three things it shows right away

One district stands far above the rest. Ilocos Norte’s 1st District goes from PhP0.37 billion in the NEP to PhP4.74 billion in the House bill, a change of PhP4.38 billion. Of the 433 lines listed for it, 405 appear only in the House bill. The largest single line is a PhP190 million bridge in Vintar, on page 464 of the third-reading document.

Ninety districts cannot be read alone. Their DPWH office serves more than one district, so the figure covers the neighbours too. The site shows those figures whole and marks them, because splitting an office’s budget between districts would invent a number that no document contains.

Five districts carry no money at all in this comparison. Lanao del Sur’s 1st and 2nd Districts, Maguindanao del Norte, Maguindanao del Sur and Tawi-Tawi have no DPWH office line anywhere in the 2027 comparison. A district missing from a national list is worth knowing about, so the site says so instead of showing zero.

One more number matters for anyone reading the map. Of the PhP587.08 billion in the House bill, PhP410.83 billion sits with the DPWH Central Office and cannot be placed by province. The site names that gap on the map and repeats it on the About page rather than quietly leaving it out.

What it does not claim

A line that appears in the House bill and not in the NEP is a candidate, not a confirmed insertion. A renamed project, a re-scoped project and a genuinely new project look identical from the outside, and the matching behind this data is done by name, place and amount. The site says “in the House bill only” and links the page. It does not say anyone inserted anything.

Amounts are appropriations as printed. They are the authority to spend, not spending, and not completion. The site repeats that on every page that carries a figure.

How it is built

The project is built on the transparency portal that BetterGov.ph published under the MIT licence, and reads their public Budget API. We kept their rules and their caution, and replaced the presentation with our own.

The result is a static site. There is no server, no database and no hosting bill, which means it stays up on its own and costs nothing to keep. A pipeline rebuilds the numbers from the API, and a set of checks refuses to publish if any total fails to reconcile. One of those checks is strict: the money placed by province, the money held by the central office and the money held by city and regional offices must add up to the national figure exactly, to the peso.

The district briefs on each page are written by a rule, not by a language model. Every number in a brief is re-derived from the data at build time, so a sentence cannot invent a figure.

Why we built it

Budget documents are public. The problem is that a province, a city or a district is buried hundreds of pages into a file that most readers will never open. A national dashboard that stops at the department level does not tell a reader whether the road in their town survived the House version.

Budget Pilipinas starts at the district because that is where a reader lives. If the tool is useful, it is because it answers a question that fits in one sentence: what happened to my district’s money?

The site is free, needs no account and carries no ads. Corrections are welcome: if a figure disagrees with the document, the document is right, and we will fix the snapshot.

Budget Pilipinas is a project of Gadget Pilipinas and Blip Media. Data and methodology come from BetterGov.ph’s open Budget API and its MIT-licensed transparency portal.