Credit holidays for small companies will start working in 2026

Small companies will be able to use the loan vacation mechanism starting in 2026. Anatoly Aksakov, head of the State Duma Committee on the financial market, told Izvestia about this.

A break is in the works: credit vacations for SMEs postponed until at least July 2025

Why the authorities are delaying the introduction of a grace period for small businesses, despite the relevance of this support measure

This mechanism was announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a message to the Federal Assembly in February 2024. He proposed to grant small businesses the right to take vacations every five years to pay off loans for up to six months without worsening their credit history.

Now the text of the bill mentions the self-employed, while initially there was no task to extend credit holidays to them, Aksakov recalled. He added that professional income tax payers can already use the mechanism as individuals, if there are any prerequisites for this.

This may become one of the cornerstones in the adoption of the bill, experts interviewed by Izvestia believe. On the one hand, the role of self—employed people in the economy has grown - there are already more than 12 million of them, said independent expert Andrei Barkhota. This is primarily due to the relatively small fiscal burden in this segment.

Nevertheless, the self—employed are involved in the production process - they create goods or provide services, Natalia Milchakova, a leading analyst at Freedom Finance Global, pointed out. However, sometimes they have accounting periods when there is no income at all — for example, at certain times of the year. In this case, there is a risk that they will start asking en masse to take a "break" for loans.

Read more in the exclusive Izvestia article:

Payment and capacity: Business credit holidays will start operating in 2026