Serbian Mothers Get Up to 2.5 Million Dinars for Rural Home

Serbia’s Ministry of Rural Care has published a Proposal of Amendments to the Decree on grants for buying a rural house with land for 2026, first reported by Biznis.rs on September 4 at 11:33. The amendment adds a new category of applicant, mothers of newborn children, with no age limit, and for the first time allows the funds of two ministries to be combined for a single purchase.

Until now, the maximum grant for buying a rural house with land was 1.5 million dinars per beneficiary, and that figure remains the general rule of the program. When a mother of a newborn child files the application, though, the assessed market value of the house being bought can go up to 2.5 million dinars, roughly 21,000 euros. The gap is covered from two budgets: up to 1.5 million dinars still comes from the Ministry of Rural Care, while the remaining amount, up to 1 million dinars, comes from the Ministry of Family Care and Demography, drawn from funds it normally grants for a first home purchase tied to the birth of a child.

The subsidy is available to a mother who gave birth in the year before filing the application. The application goes to both ministries at the same time, and the decision by which the Ministry of Family Care and Demography grants her the childbirth based payment must be forwarded to the Ministry of Rural Care within eight days of receipt. The proposal also sets out how the property is registered in the cadastre: the mother of the newborn child holds three fifths of the ownership share, and her spouse or common law partner holds the remaining two fifths.

The change follows a memorandum signed on August 28 at the Government of Serbia by Minister of Family Care and Demography Jelena Zaric Kovacevic and Minister of Rural Care Milan Krkobabic. Zaric Kovacevic said at the signing that the combined assistance would let families choose a house that better fits their needs, while Krkobabic said the larger sum would widen the choice of houses and land in the area a family picks, especially for young mothers who see their children’s future in the countryside.

For 2026, the Ministry of Rural Care budgeted 750 million dinars for the entire rural house subsidy program. With the individual cap at 1.5 million dinars, that leaves room for about 500 beneficiaries a year. The individual cap itself already grew compared with the previous year, when 1.2 million dinars per beneficiary was approved, meaning 300,000 dinars less than now, or roughly 25 percent lower. The amendment does not increase the program’s total budget; it only widens the pool of eligible applicants and changes how the two funding sources are combined for mothers of newborns.

The draft decree is currently in the public disclosure phase for the amended text, and the statements from the two ministries do not specify when the government is expected to adopt its final form.