Bulgaria policy interest rate

What this value means

STRUCTURAL NOTE: Bulgaria has NO national policy rate. BULGARIA ADOPTED THE EURO ON 1 JANUARY 2026 and is the 21st member of the euro area. This was established from primary sources, not assumed: (a) Council Decision (EU) 2025/1407 of 8 July 2025 on the adoption of the euro by Bulgaria on 1 January 2026; (b) Council Regulation (EU) 2025/1409 of 8 July 2025 amending Regulation (EC) No 2866/98, which inserts the irrevocably fixed conversion rate of 1.95583 Bulgarian lev per euro (the lev's former ERM II central rate) and entered into force on 1 January 2026; (c) Council Regulation amending Regulation (EC) No 974/98 on the introduction of the euro in Bulgaria; and (d) the ECB's own changeover and Economic Bulletin material confirming the changeover happened. CONSEQUENCE FOR THIS SERIES: Bulgaria's currency-board arrangement, which had pegged the lev to the D-mark and then the euro for more than 25 years under the Закон за БНБ, ENDED with euro adoption; the BNB is now a full member of the Eurosystem and its Governor sits on the ECB Governing Council. Monetary policy for the euro area is set by that Council under Art. 127-133 TFEU and the ESCB/ECB Statute. The value served is therefore the euro-area-wide ECB deposit facility rate (DFR), identical in all 21 euro-area members, not a Bulgarian-specific rate. On 11 June 2026 the Governing Council raised all three key rates by 25 basis points with effect from 17 June 2026: deposit facility 2.25%, main refinancing operations (MRO) 2.40%, marginal lending facility 2.65% - the first ECB increase since September 2023, the ECB citing energy-driven inflation pressure from the Middle East conflict. At its meeting of 23 July 2026 the Governing Council left all three rates UNCHANGED, so 2.25% is still in force on the last_confirmed date. The DFR is served rather than the MRO because since the 18 March 2024 framework change the ECB steers short-term money-market rates through the DFR. WHAT REPLACED THE OLD BULGARIAN RATE: the BNB Governing Council decided on 27 November 2025 to cease compiling and publishing both the LEONIA Plus overnight index and the основен лихвен процент (ОЛП, 'base interest rate') with effect from 1 January 2026, and repealed the Methodology for determining the base interest rate, because non-cash transactions denominated in lev ceased. The ОЛП was announced for the LAST time at 1.81%, effective 1 December 2025 (see history). IMPORTANT: even before euro entry the ОЛП was NOT a discretionary policy instrument - under a currency board the BNB had no policy rate at all, and the ОЛП was a REFERENCE rate derived mechanically from money-market data (the LEONIA Plus index). Its main legal use was as the base for statutory default interest (законна лихва) at ОЛП + 10 percentage points; from 1 January 2026 that formula was replaced, per Directive 2011/7/EU as applied to euro-area states, by the ECB main refinancing operations rate + 8 percentage points. Do NOT serve the old ОЛП, and do not treat an ECB rate plus 8 points as a policy rate either - it is a statutory-interest reference. ACCESS: bnb.bg could not be fetched from this environment - the TLS chain fails verification ('unable to verify the first certificate') on both the Bulgarian and English press-release and statistics URLs, so the BNB decision was corroborated via БТА (the state news agency) reporting of the 27 November 2025 Governing Council decision. ecb.europa.eu and eur-lex ELI pages: the ECB pages load as clean static HTML; EUR-Lex returned empty bodies to the fetcher and consilium.europa.eu press releases returned HTTP 403, so the Council acts are cited by number rather than from a retrieved page.

Earlier values

Get it programmatically

curl https://euroref.dev/v1/bg/policy-rate
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://euroref.dev/v1/bg/policy-rate/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://euroref.dev/provenance/bg/policy-rate

Other Bulgaria series: VAT rate · minimum wage · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates · ECB main refinancing rate · late-payment interest rate