Small teams, manual tools, rising compliance expectations, and less certain funding show up in every function Euna Solutions surveyed this year. The 2026 State of Public Sector Finance report brings together findings from three surveys of 197 public sector professionals to show where those pressures overlap and what the organizations pulling ahead are doing about it.
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This report combines three surveys Euna Solutions fielded throughout 2026: the State of Public Budgeting (46 respondents), the State of Grants Management and Technology (51 respondents), and the State of Public Procurement (100 respondents). Together they reflect the experiences of 197 public sector professionals who plan budgets, pursue and manage grant funding, and oversee purchasing and supplier relationships, often with the same limited capacity.
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Public sector finance teams are being asked to do more with the same stretched capacity. More than half of budget respondents lead teams of three or fewer, 58% of procurement respondents lead teams of five or fewer, and 54% of grants professionals name limited staff capacity as their top challenge. The people doing the work are outnumbered by the work itself.
Each team feels that pressure in a different place. Budget teams are planning for an uncertain year with tools built for a simpler one, grants teams are chasing more funding while manual tasks already take up to half the week for many of them, and procurement teams are trying to stay ahead of compliance while the process still runs on email threads and spreadsheets. Read side by side, these are the same gap showing up at three stages of one cycle: plan, fund, and deliver.
The 2026 State of Public Sector Finance report examines where those pressures overlap, what the organizations pulling ahead have in common, and why the teams getting real value from AI this year fixed their infrastructure first.
Our research highlights several trends shaping the future of public sector finance:
Limited staff capacity is the top challenge for 54% of grants professionals, 58% of procurement respondents lead teams of five or fewer, and more than half of budget respondents lead teams of three or fewer. The pattern holds across every function surveyed, and it means the fix has to be structural rather than a matter of adding more hands.
44% of grants teams track opportunities and documentation in spreadsheets or a patchwork of systems, and only 7% of procurement teams operate on a dedicated cloud-based eProcurement platform. On the budget side, 74% still publish budget books exclusively as PDFs or printed documents, and 67% of the teams that do scenario planning are still doing it in spreadsheets.
77% of grants respondents report increased compliance requirements this year, and ensuring compliance is the top internal challenge for procurement teams at 46%. One in five budget respondents still don’t know that the 2026 ADA Title II updates apply to their financial documents, which shows how much of this load is being absorbed without the systems to support it.
80% of grants respondents are worried about how stable their funding will be, and 57% of budget respondents point to reduced state or federal funding as their top revenue risk. Rising costs of goods and services has been procurement’s top external challenge for three years running, named again this year by 74% of respondents.
Half of budget respondents don’t use AI in budgeting at all, and adoption splits sharply by team size, with 59% of larger teams using it compared with 17% of teams of three or fewer. Grants is a step ahead, with 29% actively using automation or AI and half still exploring, while procurement shows the strongest interest at 39% but the least confidence in readiness at 17%.
The 2026 State of Public Sector Finance report is a research-based publication that combines three Euna Solutions surveys covering budgeting, grants management, and procurement. It is written for public sector leaders who oversee or depend on these functions, including Finance Directors, Budget Directors, Grants Managers, Procurement Directors, Chief Financial Officers, and City and County Managers. The report examines where the pressures on each team overlap and closes with five key takeaways.
The report follows the work from planning the budget to winning funding to delivering through procurement, and it shows how organizations like the City of Lakeway, the City of Detroit, Bingham Healthcare, and Indian River County closed the gap with purpose-built systems. Leaders can use the findings and takeaways to build the case for centralized systems, benchmark their own team’s capacity and tools against 197 survey respondents, and plan for AI adoption on a foundation of clean, connected data.
Most resources look at budgeting, grants, or procurement on their own. This Euna Solutions report reads three firsthand surveys side by side, drawing on 197 public sector professionals, to show the pressures these teams share and what changes when the right infrastructure is in place.
The way you can transform a grant program by introducing simple technology solutions is truly transformative. After our experience of implementing Euna Grants, we can’t imagine managing grants any other way.
Hallie Brown
Deputy Director, Infrastructure Division, New Mexico DFA
