ArmInfo. The Armenian Cabinet of Ministers will allocate an additional 4.6 billion drams to reward civil servants who excelled in the second half of 2025. In the future, when assessing their performance, investments in self-education will also be taken into account.
Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Khachatryan, presenting the draft decision at a Cabinet meeting on March 12, recalled that in November 2025, the Armenian government approved a pilot program to evaluate the performance and provide incentives for civil servants who demonstrate high productivity and engage in self-education. "The program's core is to provide financial incentives to civil servants for high performance and, consequently, for improving the quality of public service. Consistent work in this direction is the foundation that should ensure the retention of competitive personnel in the system and the attraction of new ones, as well as ensure that state resources allocated to government bodies are spent most effectively and directed toward the organization of high-quality public service," said Tigran Khachatryan.
At the end of last year, a final assessment of the program's effectiveness for the first half of 2025 was completed for 15 government bodies and in 57 specific areas. The government agency salary fund was increased by 3.6 billion drams.
Based on the results of the second half of 2025, the funds allocated for additional pay are estimated at approximately 4.6 billion drams. As Khachatryan noted, an important feature of the distribution of funds for the second half of 2025 is that, in practice, the implementation of the requirement for monetary investments in education, which was implemented within the framework of the program in effect in the first half of the year, will also be taken into account.
"By the end of this half-year, we will have a general report on how much money pilot program participants have invested in educational expenses," he said, noting that analyzing the pilot program's results allows for parallel work on developing legislative acts. Based on this work, it will be possible to move from the pilot program to long-term regulations and submit a proposal for legislative regulation of civil servant remuneration mechanisms to the National Assembly this year for discussion.
For his part, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated that, despite criticism for additional pay, they are taking an important step toward further developing statehood, which fits within their agenda for the eternity of the state.
"We have seen from experience that this system, first and foremost, brings results to the citizens of Armenia and, overall, promotes the most effective management of public resources. I consider this system important from the standpoint of anti-corruption policy," he said. In the future, the Prime Minister continued, it is necessary to ensure that civil servants become specialists who are maximally focused on their work and who make every effort to achieve their goals.
"An important factor here is that we promote the continuous improvement of the educational level of civil servants. This is also, in essence, a very important contribution to the further development of our education system, since today I already see and sense that new services are emerging in our educational market, new offers are emerging, which, in turn, will bring additional economic benefits. As a result of this process and this reform, we must set higher standards for transition to public service. At this stage, we encourage those currently in service to work on themselves to achieve the highest possible qualifications.
However, at some point, we must conclude that the qualification standards required for entry into public service must be significantly changed," Nikol Pashinyan noted. "It is necessary to exclude the situation where a person starts working in the state system because he cannot find a job in a more competitive sector," the head of the RA government concluded.
