Tax Freedom Day represents the symbolic date on which citizens have theoretically earned enough to cover their annual share of public expenditure. (source: Sme - Jozef Jakubčo)
Slovaks will mark Tax Freedom Day on June 26 this year – 25 days later than their neighbours in the Czech Republic. This delay reflects a higher level of public spending relative to economic output, the think tank Institute of Economic and Social Studies (INESS) said as cited by the SITA newswire.
Tax Freedom Day
Tax Freedom Day in Slovakia has been counted annually since 1999 until 2021 by the Taxpayers Association of Slovakia, in cooperation with the F. A. Hayek Foundation. In 2024, the project was taken over by the Institute for Freedom and Entrepreneurship, which is publishing it for the first time in 2025 in cooperation with the Czech Liberal Institute, the Taxpayers Association of Slovakia and with the support of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom. The aim of the project is to promote public and expert debate on the scope of public spending, the efficiency of its use and the state of public finances in Slovakia.
Tax Freedom Day represents the symbolic date on which citizens have theoretically earned enough to cover their annual share of public expenditure. From that point onward, they are considered to be working for themselves rather than for the state. This year, that means Slovaks will spend the first 176 days of the year covering government costs, while the remaining 189 days will be for their own needs. In the Czech Republic, this symbolic threshold is reached on June 1.
Slovakia ranks among EU countries with an above-average tax and levy burden. Tax Freedom Day falls later in only 10 out of the 27 EU member states.
A look at EU rankings reveals that, within central and eastern Europe, Slovakia joins Poland and Croatia in the bottom 10 in terms of tax freedom. According to Ján Oravec, the SaS party’s economic team leader, most other post-communist countries allow citizens and businesses to retain a greater share of their income and redistribute less through public finances.
In his op-ed for the Hospodárske Noviny economic daily, Oravec notes that Finland and France have the highest levels of public redistribution in the EU, which pushes their respective Tax Freedom Days to the end of July.
Looking at these countries may raise the question of whether the concept of Tax Freedom Day is misleading, considering that they are, in many respects, more developed than Slovakia. Oravec’s response: it is not.
“The overall financial burden is a combination of an economy’s capacity to sustain it, and more importantly, the willingness of citizens and businesses to accept it,” Oravec wrote. “From the perspective of economic capacity, we are already at or beyond the limit of what the system can bear.”
However, the most dramatic difference, he added, lies in the quality of services funded by public expenditure.
“If anyone still has doubts, they only need to read the annual reports of the Supreme Audit Office (NKÚ) from recent years, which present a highly critical reflection on how public funds are being spent,” he said.
INESS attributes the delayed Tax Freedom Day in Slovakia to the ongoing rise in public spending. Between 2019 and 2024, public sector expenditure increased by more than 6 percentage points of GDP – the highest rise among all EU countries, according to the think tank.
The 2025 calculation is also the first to use an updated methodology aligned with the European Commission’s autumn forecast, which INESS says improves international comparability.
The earliest Tax Freedom Day ever recorded in Slovakia was on May 13, 2007. Compared to 2025, Slovaks that year worked 43 fewer days to cover public expenditure.
