Have you ever wondered how much it would cost the Australian Government to lower personal income taxes? What about an increase to the rate of the JobSeeker payment? Or what would happen if the unemployment rate were to fall below historic lows?

Build your own budget is an educational tool to explore these questions and more.

Using Build your own budget, you can adjust various policy and economic parameters to test their impact on the Commonwealth fiscal position.

The estimates baseline produced using this tool underpin Beyond the budget 2024-25: Fiscal outlook and sustainability.

You can download the spreadsheet above and start exploring the impact of different economic assumptions and policy settings of your choice.

You should attribute any analysis undertaken using this tool as "using the Parliamentary Budget Office's analysis tool Build your own budget". The tool produces indicative numbers to help with your thinking, but it does not deliver full PBO costings.

The tool is currently only available in Microsoft Excel format, and will not work in other applications such as Google Sheets.

For an overview of how the tool works, and the types of changes you can test, watch the video below.

* Minor updates between those shown above are listed in the Change Log on the 'instructions' tab

** The modelling for these editions of Build your own Budget are the same as for the May 2024 and May 2023 Budget editions respectively, with scaling factors to ensure consistency with the December 2024 and December 2023 Mid-year economic and fiscal outlooks (MYEFO). 

We would like to hear about your experience using the Build your own budget tool and any suggestions for enhancement.

We're interested in your thoughts about any challenges you encountered using the tool, what you like about it, or ways you think the tool could be improved.

You can help shape the future of 'Build your own budget' by filling out our short survey, or provide more detailed feedback by emailing feedback@pbo.gov.au.