Bangladesh Bank posted a massive profit in fiscal year 2025-26. The central bank made a net, or actual, profit of 259 billion taka last fiscal year, up 32.8 billion taka from the previous fiscal year, 2024-25. Profit in 2024-25 stood at 226.2 billion taka.
The central bank’s board of directors approved the financial statements for the past fiscal year at a meeting Sunday. The meeting, held in the central bank’s boardroom and chaired by Governor Mostakur Rahman, was attended by the institution’s directors. The board also approved an incentive bonus of six times basic salary for central bank officials.
Economists say a central bank’s core function in any country is not to make a profit. As a regulatory body, its main responsibilities are overseeing the banking sector, controlling inflation, boosting private-sector investment and creating jobs. They say Bangladesh Bank’s profit has risen this sharply precisely because of distress in the economy and banking sector. Even so, they caution, the central bank must ensure that pursuing profit doesn’t in any way divert it from its core mandate.
It is understood that even as the broader economy remained sluggish, the central bank’s lending operations stayed brisk. With a liquidity crunch in the banking sector, various banks borrowed more than before from Bangladesh Bank, boosting the central bank’s interest income. In addition, reserve funds invested in various countries around the world also generated good returns. These factors together drove up the central bank’s profit.
In fiscal year 2023-24, the central bank had made an actual profit of roughly 400 billion taka, of which net profit stood at 153 billion taka.