Don’t forget to get your technology remediation number into the FY27 budget before the window shuts

Most corporate FY27 budgets are drafted and locked between September and early November 2026. If your technology remediation number is not in the draft before it goes up the chain, you will spend the whole of next year funding it out of contingency you do not have.

Who this is for

• Fractional or interim CTOs who inherited an estate part-way through the cycle.
• Heads of technology whose CFO has asked, once, for “the number”.
• Founders whose financial year runs to a calendar or fiscal-statement rhythm.
• Anyone carrying remediation they have quietly deferred for two planning cycles.

What is actually happening

Budget season is a fixed window, and it is not the whole year. Ireland has confirmed Budget 2027 for 6 October 2026. The UK autumn budget has not been dated for 2026 yet, but the 2025 statement landed on 26 November and the autumn rhythm rarely moves far. Most corporate FY27 planning cycles close in that same September-to-November stretch, taking their cue from the fiscal statements around them.

The date that matters to you, though, is not the Chancellor’s. It is your organisation’s internal submission deadline, and it almost always sits several weeks before the public one. By the time a budget is announced, the numbers behind it were settled long ago. If you are waiting for a headline to remind you, you have already missed the meeting where the money was allocated.

Why it bites

Technical debt that has not been costed is invisible to the board. It does not appear in a spreadsheet, so it does not compete for funding, so it does not get funded — until it fails, at which point it is an incident and not a line item. Remediation financed out of contingency is remediation done badly, in a hurry, under a CFO who is now annoyed.

There is a second cost. An estate you have deferred for two cycles is exactly what an acquirer, an auditor or a regulator finds first. I have audited estates where the remediation everyone knew about had simply never been written down anywhere a decision-maker would see it. The gap between “we all know about that” and “it is in the budget” is where next year’s crisis lives.

The one thing to do before the window shuts

Produce one costed remediation line before your internal deadline. Not a menu, not a roadmap — one line, three columns: what breaks if we do nothing, when it breaks, and the number to stop it. Tie each entry to something already on your risk register, so it is not the technology function inventing work. One page the CFO can lift straight into the model without translation.

If you only get one thing into the FY27 draft, make it that. A costed line survives the meeting. A verbal warning does not.

This is the kind of number I help technology leaders build and defend — see how I work, or read what an acquirer finds before you do.

If you want a second pair of eyes on the remediation number before it goes into the FY27 draft, that is what my advisory work is for. Better now than in the post-mortem.

Advisory is fixed-scope and priced up front, so the review costs less than one month of the contingency you are trying to avoid.

Ireland’s date is 6 October. Yours is probably sooner. Get the line in.