2026-11-12T15:36:47+00:00
Shafaq News- Erbil
Baghdad prevented the Kurdistan Region (KRI) to hire new public employees for more than 12 years, Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Prime Minister Masrour Barzani said on Thursday.
Speaking at a graduation ceremony at Salahaddin University in Erbil, Barzani hoped that his talks with Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi and federal ministers would reach a fair understanding on the budget that would allow recruitment to resume and create jobs for young people.
“The KRG has offered broad incentives to the private sector, raised the share of local young people that investment projects must employ, and is amending the labor law to protect private sector workers and secure their futures on a par with public employees,” he said.
A Heavy Payroll
By the end of 2025, the KRG was paying salaries or monthly assistance to 1,190,391 people, at a cost of about 945.8 billion dinars (roughly $622M) each month, according to the KRG Ministry of Finance and Economy’s 2019–2025 report, Transparency, Expenditure, and Revenue of the Kurdistan Regional Government.
Government employees account for 664,933 recipients, or about 56%; the remaining 525,458 are pensioners and other beneficiaries. Permanent civil servants form the largest group, at 382,350, followed by 201,337 civilian pensioners, 152,182 serving Peshmerga, and 139,015 retired Peshmerga. The payroll also covers 87,505 Interior Ministry personnel, 83,224 families of martyrs and Anfal victims, 70,945 social-protection beneficiaries, 42,896 Asayish personnel, and 30,937 contract employees.
Erbil Province accounts for 585,364 recipients, or about 49% of the total, followed by Al-Sulaymaniyah with 436,740, Duhok with 140,206, and Halabja with 15,334. A further 12,747 recipients are recorded under other areas.
Separately, the KRG lists 86,791 contract employees, teachers, lecturers and other workers paid through several funding channels, at a monthly cost of about 42.6 billion dinars (roughly $28 million). They include 41,382 teaching staff.
KRG said on Saturday that the total federal transfers to the KRI fell about 105 trillion Iraqi dinars ($69.1 billion) short of its calculated budget allocations for 2014 through 2025.
Read more: KRG: Baghdad funded one-third of salary months since 2014
Source: Shafaq News
