SCELC News

2024 Budget Survey Results

The results are in from SCELC's annual Fall Budget Survey. Each year, SCELC checks in with Member and Affiliate institutions on their budgets and spending priorities for the coming year.

This year, we received data from 123 respondents, including 60 Members and 63 Affiliates. Thank you to those that provided their data for this report!

The good news is that nearly half of our responding libraries reported increases, but a third of collections budgets were flat and 20% report budget reductions for fiscal year 2025.

Drilling down into the budget specifics, libraries also reported modest improvement on their collections budgets although their overall operating budgets remain nearly flat. The longer-term story is that budgets have not recovered from FY2021's pandemic-era cuts.

Slicing the data by FTE band, we see variations on the above theme, with a notable drop among schools with over 12,001 FTE and a slight drop for those between 1,201 and 3,000 FTE. Meanwhile, our middle FTE bands did see some increases– sometimes even beating inflation.

In terms of priorities, 51% of respondents are looking to prioritize acquisitions, subscriptions and purchases. Fewer respondents (26%) are prioritizing staff spending this year. (Note the nearly mirrored shift in those two priorities from last year to this year.) One possible conclusion is that open positions may have been filled last year, resulting in less need. However, we also hear many schools describing failed search attempts, so another factor could be acquiescence to a tight labor market. 

For a look at past results, please see our Library Budget Survey LibGuide.