Ethiopia's T-Bill Market Awaits Its Next Calendar After a Record Year of Issuance

Ethiopia's first full year of pre-announced Treasury Bill (T-bill) auctions has just closed, and the market is now waiting for what comes next. The Ministry of Finance (MoF) has not yet published the first-quarter auction calendar for the upcoming fiscal year, EFY 2019 (2026/27), which begins on Hamle 1 (about July 8, 2026). The last auction of the year just ended fell on June 24, 2026, and until the new schedule appears, investors lack official visibility on the next auction dates, the planned issuance per tenor, and the settlement and maturity timeline.

A pre-published calendar is a planning tool, not a market formality. It tells banks, insurers, public institutions, and individual investors when paper will be sold, in what size, and at which maturities, so they can position cash, prepare bids, and coordinate with licensed intermediaries ahead of each auction. For a market still building depth, that forward visibility also dampens the supply-surprise premium that used to be priced into yields when auction sizes were decided on the day.

How the calendar regime began

The shift to a published calendar is recent. The MoF issued its first-ever quarterly T-bill issuance calendar in July 2025, framing it as part of a broader effort to modernize public-finance management, support market-based deficit financing through domestic-currency securities, and give participants clearer sight of upcoming auctions.² Before that, the market learned each auction's size only when it was announced. EFY 2018 (2025/26) was therefore the first year conducted end to end under the calendar approach, across four quarterly schedules and the four standard tenors of 28, 91, 182, and 364 days.

The EFY 2018 auction schedule in review

The cleanest way to read the year is to set the published plan against what the government actually offered and what the market took.

EFY 2018 (2025/26): scheduled, actual offered, and accepted by quarter (ETB billion)

The four tenor columns are the scheduled (calendar) amounts; their sum is "Total scheduled." "Actual offered" is the amount the government actually auctioned, and "Total accepted" is the amount it took. Q1's actual offered figure runs above its plan partly because one auction (July 9, 2025) preceded the first published calendar.

Three features stand out from the table. The plan itself was built around the medium and long tenors: across the year the MoF scheduled ETB 361.4 billion at the 182-day (39% of the plan) and ETB 251.8 billion at the 91-day (27%), with the one-year at ETB 228.7 billion (25%) and only ETB 76.4 billion of one-month paper (8%). The government's published intent, in other words, was to fund itself mainly at three to twelve months and to lean on the 28-day only lightly.

Actual supply then ran ahead of that plan for most of the year before pulling back at the end. The government's actual offered total reached ETB 994.4 billion against a scheduled ETB 918.3 billion, about 8% above plan over the full year, but the pattern reversed inside the year: offers exceeded the calendar through the first three quarters and fell to 85% of plan in the fourth. That Q4 retreat is the same supply restraint visible in the late-cycle auctions, when the government trimmed issuance into strong demand to push its borrowing cost down.

Acceptance, finally, was high and steady. The government accepted ETB 964.2 billion of the ETB 994.4 billion it actually offered, a 97% clearance rate, meaning it absorbed almost all of its own supply rather than rationing it. One caveat frames the whole table: these are gross issuance flows, the bulk of which refinance maturing bills rather than raise net new money, so the totals measure the market's turnover, not the growth of government debt.

How issuance links to the federal budget

T-bills exist to serve the budget. They raise short-term domestic financing, refinance maturing securities, and smooth the government's cash flow, so the scale of issuance moves with the state's financing needs and with the depth of the market available to meet them. Both have been rising.

Ethiopia's approved federal budget reached ETB 1.93 trillion for EFY 2018 (2025/26), a 34.4% increase on the prior year's roughly ETB 1.43 trillion.³ For the upcoming EFY 2019 (2026/27), the Council of Ministers approved a draft budget of ETB 2.339 trillion on June 9, 2026 and forwarded it to the House of Peoples' Representatives, a further 21% rise that has not yet been enacted.⁴ With more than 80% of the budget financed from domestic revenue, the government's ability to borrow at home, and the market's appetite to lend, matter more with each cycle.

Set the two most recent fiscal years side by side and the T-bill market's transformation is clearer than the budget's.

EFY 2017 vs EFY 2018: T-bill actual offered and accepted by quarter (ETB billion)

EFY 2017 and EFY 2018 actual offered and accepted amounts, by quarter, in ETB billion.

Gross issuance more than doubled between the two years, from ETB 452.8 billion actually offered to ETB 994.4 billion, while the accepted amount rose even faster, from ETB 370.5 billion to ETB 964.2 billion, an increase of 160%. Both far outpace the 34% rise in the budget over the same period. The widest gap is in demand: total bids climbed from about ETB 377 billion in EFY 2017 to roughly ETB 1.66 trillion in EFY 2018, so a market that was on average undersubscribed (bids covered only 0.8 times the offer) became one that was heavily oversubscribed (about 1.7 times). The acceptance rate moved in step, from 82% of the amount offered in EFY 2017 to 97% in EFY 2018, as the government no longer had to ration a thin order book.

That gross issuance grew several times faster than the budget should not be read as T-bills financing a proportionally larger deficit. The opposite happened to the debt stock: the IMF reports that outstanding T-bills fell from ETB 447.8 billion to ETB 272.2 billion, about 1.9% of GDP, as most pension-fund holdings were converted into longer-term bonds.⁵ The reconciliation is that the auction market deepened, more frequent, larger, and fully cleared, even as the stock of bills outstanding shrank. The budget leans on domestic financing more each year, but T-bills currently carry a small and falling share of it; what changed in EFY 2018 was the market's liquidity, not the government's reliance on short-term debt.

What to watch as the new calendar approaches

The immediate signal is the EFY 2019 first-quarter calendar itself. When it appears, the questions that matter are whether the MoF keeps the bi-weekly auction rhythm, how it splits the planned offer across the four tenors, and whether the total points to heavier or lighter issuance than the ETB 918 billion it scheduled last year. A plan tilted further toward the 182- and 364-day would signal an intent to term out funding; a heavier short end would point to near-term cash management.

The published plan is only half the story, as EFY 2018 showed: the government offered above its calendar for three quarters and below it in the fourth, so the gap between the schedule and the actual offer will again be where the intent shows. Read against the recent auction results, where yields have fallen steadily and demand has stayed firm, the new calendar will indicate how the government intends to balance a larger budget, a still-deepening market, and a borrowing cost it has worked to bring down.