The United Nations’ financial crisis is progressively worsening as a possible doomsday — when the organization can no longer keep its lights on — inches closer with every unpaid or delayed dues payment from all 193 members.
In the last two years, the 80-year-old institution has been dealing with an unprecedented liquidity crunch that has caused it to roll back lifesaving programs, cut its expenses even down to paper towels and reduce the overall number of staff.
Secretary-General António Guterres has clearly warned of impending disaster if member states continue to default on paying their mandatory financial obligations. With every alarm he has sounded, his words grow grimmer each time. Yet, a proposal by Guterres could help rescue the UN from financial abyss, albeit temporarily, involving a decades-old financial rule that critics say is contributing to the liquidity crunch.
In October 2025, as Guterres presented a slimmed 2026 budget to member states, he warned of a “race to bankruptcy.” The 2026 budget was about 15 percent lower than the previous year’s. The situation became more dire when it became obvious that the United States, the largest contributor, based on a formula accepted by all member states, was going to withhold its share of 22 percent of the regular budget.
The Trump administration says, however, that its obligatory fees to the UN are conditional. “The UN is in need of continued dramatic reform, and we intend to continue to use our fees that they claim we owe as leverage for that,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified to the US Congress on June 3, without providing any specifics of reforms it wants.
Freeze or reform?
Using details from internal financial documents, copious closed-door negotiations reviewing the problematic financial rule and interviews with senior UN officials and experts, PassBlue has scrutinized the heated debate among member states on whether to freeze the difficult credit system or to reform the entire financial architecture.
“We had to reduce our activities, and the price was largely paid by those that received assistance from the UN,” Guterres told a group of journalists during his visit to Japan on May 22. “Which means there is more anger, which means there is less vaccination, which means there is less support for water and sanitation, which means more people die.”
“That is the reality,” he added. “The UN will move on. The UN was prepared for this and has been able to reform itself and is slim enough to be able to go on. But obviously, the price was paid by those that we were trying to support and some of them in very desperate situations.”
Only 55 — or 28.5 percent — of the organization’s 193 countries paid their dues in full this year within the required 30 days of the new calendar, or by Feb. 8, 2026. In 2026, as part of the decades-old ruling, 9.3 percent of the regular budget from 2025 was returned to member states as a credit, according to confidential financial documents seen by PassBlue. Assuming the 2027 budget is similar to that of 2026, the credit figure is projected to increase to 13 percent by next year at the current rate of delinquency.
The situation is even more alarming across all the three main budget streams — regular, peacekeeping and tribunals — so that if no action is taken, the UN may be forced to return approximately $1.3 billion in credits in 2027 across the regular and peacekeeping budgets.
As of April 30, 2026, the latest public accounting by the General Assembly’s finance committee, unpaid assessments for both regular budget and peacekeeping operations were approximately $2.8 billion and $3.5 billion, respectively.
As such, Guterres has proposed that the UN’s credit-return system, established in the 1960s and requiring the organization to reimburse unspent funds or uncollected dues to member states as credits — to be applied toward future assessments — to be completely reformed or frozen.
The plan would allow the UN to regain its balance as it manages the cash crunch. In defending his proposal, Guterres has told member states that his UN80 reform initiative to make the organization more nimble, “cannot substitute for or compensate for failure to honor that basic treaty obligation” of countries paying their assessments in full and on time.
His proposal would ensure that uncollected dues from nonpaying members do not automatically trigger budget reductions for the next year.
“Without action and under the present rules, the Organization will be forced to give back millions across regular budget and peacekeeping operations that it could not spend because it did not collect it,” Guterres’s spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, told PassBlue in an email on June 10.
Catherine Pollard, the undersecretary-general for management strategy, policy and compliance, said in May that the UN started the year with no cash reserves and drained its Working Capital Fund and Special Account — that is, its financial set-asides to ensure cash flow and cover short-term deficits.
According to internal account documents seen by PassBlue, 2025 year-end arrears was more than $1.5 billion, or more than 60 percent of the cash reserve at the time.
A month into executing the approved $3.238 billion regular budget for 2026, Guterres issued what seemed as his starkest warning yet. He told member states in a letter that the organization was at risk of “imminent financial collapse,” as it might run out of cash by July. A Wall Street Journal report said the doomsday might be August, a month before the high-level annual meeting of the UN General Assembly, the biggest event on the organization’s calendar.
“There’s no hard date for the doomsday scenario,” Dujarric said on June 1, soon after Japan paid its $221,861,490 annual dues and China sent $844 million for part of its dues to the 2025-2026 peacekeeping budget.
The cash injection from these two countries brought relief but only enough to keep the lights on for a few more months and perhaps just enough to cover the bills for the 81st high-level week of the General Assembly in September. One UN budget specialist said it was impossible to know what might exactly trigger the lights going off, however, since some UN entities are better budgeted than others.
Pay in full, on time
A sustainable solution would be for member states to pay their dues in full and on time, UN experts roundly say. But since there are no strong-enough enforcement measures (other than the complex step whereby a country loses its right to vote in the General Assembly), reforming the credit-return system would allow the UN financial wiggle room as an alternative.
Unlike other international organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development or NATO, which return only actual cash surpluses, the UN returns so-called “phantom money” that was never actually received from delinquent member states.
The money is applied as credits to every member state, including those who never paid, automatically at the beginning of the next financial cycle. The implication is that the incoming budget is immediately reduced on the revenue side. However, the spending mandate remains at 100 percent, causing the financing gap to widen instantly.
It also means that the largest contributor, Washington, which has failed to pay its dues in full since 2024, ends up receiving the largest credits, a situation that some senior UN staffers have described as “insane.”
“Unlike a government,” Dujarric said on behalf of his boss, Guterres, “the UN cannot borrow or print money. It is a huge challenge to manage an organization with a set budget — based on mandatory contributions — if you can’t predict when and if the money will come.”
Member states have not all embraced Guterres’s proposal, PassBlue found. While most countries agree that the system must change, some have said retaining credits is not a long-term solution. Others suggest that a temporary freeze on returning credits might be the most feasible step to buy time quickly.
Pilot plans
There is also disagreement among member states on the duration of reform trials, according to details obtained from closed negotiations. The Group of 77 and China proposed a three-year trial, starting from the current financial periods. The US proposed a five-year test, after which the secretary-general would report on whether to make the changes permanent.
The credit system was created so that any money left after full appropriation would be returned to member states, according to Eugene Chen, a nonresident adviser at the International Peace Institute think tank and a former UN budget official.
Chen said that member states are concerned that changing the rules could normalize nonpayment and undermine incentives for countries to meet their financial obligations. Governments that pay their assessments in full often regard credits as money they are entitled to receive, he added, so some countries fear that withholding those funds would punish compliant states while rewarding delinquent ones.
The G77 and China presented a “pilot proposal” to address the liquidity problem while minimizing disruption to the system. The group proposed categorizing credits to distinguish between those originating from nonpayment and those from other causes, according to a copy of the draft resolution to revise the credit-return system still under consideration.
The G77 and China proposed in a negotiation document seen by PassBlue to suspend the return of credits attributable to the nonpayment of assessed contributions.
“Without the credit return system, the UN will only have to shrink by the amount member states like the US don’t pay,” Ronny Patz, a UN system analyst at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability think tank, told PassBlue. “[W]ith the credit return, it just gets worse and worse, and so the system stops working unless voluntary cash is provided by other member states to fill the gaps.”
The laggards
Seventy-nine member states have yet to pay their regular budget dues this year as intense deliberations on how to solve the organization’s financial straits continue in the General Assembly’s budget committee. Nigeria, the just-elected chair of the committee, for example, has not paid its dues. (The amount it paid in 2025 was approximately $5 million.)
But back in Nigeria, the election to the powerful committee is being celebrated. President Bolo Ahmed Tinubu issued a public congratulatory message, and Jimoh Ibrahim, the country’s envoy to the UN, announced the news with cheers on social media.
“Your election to chair this important committee, within weeks of your official resumption at the UN validates your wealth of experience in public service,” the Nigerian presidency said in its message posted by the official government handle on X.
Contrary to the claims of Ibrahim and the Nigerian government on X, the African Union had long decided the seat would go to Nigeria before Ibrahim was appointed as the country’s permanent representative. The countries that would chair the 74th to 83d sessions of the budget ommittee have been declared since September 2018. Had Ibrahim not been named to the post, the chair would have fallen to Syndoph Endoni, Nigeria’s chargé d’affaires.
Nigeria is not the only delinquent country that views a prominent leadership role in the organization as a badge of honor. Washington has been jostling to resecure the highly coveted director-general position at the World Food Program as it starves the agency of resources.
Only 4 of the 15 Security Council members, or 27 percent, paid their annual dues in full and on time (by Feb. 8, 2026.). Noncompliant members combined (late or partial payments or unpaid) account for 73 percent of the Council membership. However, Pakistan paid its $3.913 million dues recently, but China has paid only $153 million of its $600-plus million dues for 2026, as it traditionally pays in the fall or by the end of the year.
Trinidad and Tobago and Zimbabwe, both just elected to a two-year term on the Council, starting Jan.1, have yet to pay their 2026 dues.
Russia, as part of the revision negotiations, has proposed more direct consequences for nonpayments. (Russia paid its dues of approximately $67 million in late March.) In the proposition it sent to the committee and seen by PassBlue, Russia suggested that the secretary-general limit the recruitment and appointment of nationals from member states whose arrears exceed one budget period, directly affecting the US.
Russia also wants the UN to freeze payments and limit new contracts to service providers and contractors registered in those delinquent states.
Patz said member states with clean payment records have tools to pressure delinquent ones, but that such measures are “quite unlikely.”
We welcome your Comments on this article. What are your thoughts on the UN's liquidity crisis?
Related Posts
Damilola Banjo is an award-winning staff reporter for PassBlue who has covered a wide range of topics, from Africa-centered stories to gender equality to UN peacekeeping and US-UN relations. She also oversees all video production for PassBlue. She was a Dag Hammarskjold fellow in 2023 and a Pulitzer Center postgraduate fellow in 2021. She was part of the BBC Africa team that produced the Emmy-nominated documentary, “Sex for Grades.” In addition, she worked for WFAE, an NPR affiliate in Charlotte, N.C. Banjo has a master’s of science degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and an undergraduate degree from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.
![[Re]Group - A Playbook for Turbulent Times -Subscribe Now](https://passblue.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/regroup-v2_unf2026_square_600.500@2x.webp)
Why has the Secretary-General appointed 20 senior officials in recent months if there is a cash crunch? Every other week, there is a new USG appointment.
Damilola, thank you for this great contribution. I think that the Russian proposal should go further i.e. countries which are not paying their dues on time should be suspended from all the instances of the UN and will be excluded from the UN when no payment is done after 1 year e.g. the USA, Nigeria, Trinidad and Tobago, and Zimbabwe are good candidates for a rapid suspension and in both cases their nationals should not be recruited as UN staff. This same rule should be applied to countries which do not respect and implement the UN resolutions (e.g. Israel). These are my strong suggestions.
Can the Secretary not criss -cross the globe, hitching rides on standby flights and charter junkets of course, shaming and harranging the world’s naughtiest children and biggest deadbeats for making the world more and more miserable and chaotic while having done more to, defame, discredit, dismantle and defund the world’s efforts to bring relief from that misery and chaos.
Rather than continuing to work for all the nations of the Earth, to establish law and order and peace and stability, the UN should work for that 99% of it that want those things, against the fraction committed to undermining them.
The UN should serve the nations of the world striving to realize it’s promise, against those cynically using it while actively betraying it. That only makes sense and it is the only way the UN can act in accordance with its Charter.