The poll by the accounting service "Aktion Bukhgalteriya" covered 1,076 companies across Russia. Several outlets reported its results, citing Forbes.

Of those surveyed, 36.2% said they were abandoning year-end payouts for the first time, having paid them a year earlier. A further 20.4% postponed the decision indefinitely. Only 22.3% of companies intend to pay bonuses to their entire staff, while 10.4% promised payments to some employees.

Among respondents, 56.9% cited worsening financial results for the year as the main reason. For 23%, the decisive factor was a decision by the owner or parent company, and for 8.8% it was the tax burden and the size of insurance contributions on bonuses.

Pressure on business intensified after tax changes: from 2025 the profit tax rose from 20% to 25%, and from the start of 2026 the main VAT rate increased from 20% to 22%. At the same time, the income threshold for exemption from VAT under the simplified system fell from 60 million to 20 million rubles a year. The Bank of Russia's key rate remains at 14%.

Official statistics confirm the deterioration in companies' position. According to Rosstat, in January-July the combined profit of Russian organizations fell 15.7% year on year, to 13 trillion rubles. The combined losses of unprofitable enterprises rose 25.6%, to 6.6 trillion rubles. The share of unprofitable companies increased from 30.6% to 33.4%.

Andrei Glushkin, a member of the general council of Delovaya Rossiya, attributes this to expensive credit, rising costs and cautious consumer demand. According to him, businesses do not always manage to pass costs on to buyers.

Alla Starchenko, a leading expert at "Aktion Bukhgalteriya," predicts a widening gap between large and small business. Large companies have reserves and formalized motivation programs and will continue to pay bonuses. Small business, where the decision depends on one person and current revenue, will abandon payouts or limit them to a few key employees.

Some companies may replace annual bonuses with quarterly bonuses, payment for training or non-material forms of motivation, experts believe. The Insider warns that dropping bonuses for qualified employees threatens additional losses in IT, the financial sector, and engineering and technology companies, where replacing a specialist is expensive.

Analysts note that Forbes does not provide details on how the sample was formed, so the results cannot be extrapolated to all Russian enterprises.