Good news for the New Year: How full is the government's treasury? The Finance Ministry released a report.

News Topical, Digital Desk : The Central Government's decision to cut GST rates just before Diwali is clearly having an impact on GST collections. According to the data given by the Finance Ministry on Thursday, the domestic Goods and Services Tax (GST) collection in December 2025 stood at Rs 1,22,574 crore, which is only 1.2 percent more than December 2024.

However, GST collection from imported products has grown at 19.7 per cent to Rs 51,977 crore from Rs 43,438 crore in December 2024. Taking these together, the gross GST collection has registered a growth of 6.1 per cent to Rs 1,74,550 crore.

However, the government's total revenue during the first nine months of the fiscal year, April to December 2025, was ₹16,50,039 crore, an 8.6 percent increase compared to the first nine months of 2024-25. The cess data presented in this figure tells a different story.

Finance Ministry released the report

The notification issued by the Finance Ministry states that the surcharge amount will be Rs 12,003 crore for December 2024 and Rs 4,238 crore for December 2025. When GST 2.0 was implemented in September 2025, cess on most items was also removed.

Cess on sin goods like tobacco, pan masala, cigarettes etc. has been continued and will now be completely removed from February 1, 2026, as per a notification issued by the Ministry of Finance on December 31, 2025. In its place, additional excise duty on tobacco and a new Health and National Security Cess on pan masala have been imposed, so that the tax burden does not decrease.

But if the cess collections reported separately by the Finance Ministry for December 2024 and December 2025 are added to the total GST collections, the total collections for December 2024 would be ₹176,559 crore and for December 2025, it would be ₹178,788 crore, which is a mere 1.2 percent increase.

There's another notable point in these figures: the domestic GST refund rate of 62 percent. In December, domestic GST refunds totaled ₹18,422 crore, compared to ₹11,372 crore last year. For the first nine months of the fiscal year, the domestic refund rate was 30.7 percent.

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