Vatican City's economy: a state that sells tickets, beside a Church that owns property

Why Vatican City keeps two sets of accounts

Two legal persons work from the same 44 hectares. Vatican City State is the territory created on 11 February 1929, run day to day by its Governorate. The Holy See is the central government of the Catholic Church, the pope together with the Roman Curia, and it is the Holy See that holds sovereignty over the state. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as Wikipedia reports it, treats them as two international identities and counts their employees separately.

Wikipedia describes a state budget that includes the Vatican Museums and the post office and is funded by the sale of stamps, coins, medals and tourist mementos, by museum admissions and by publications. Britannica describes the other side: "as the Holy See", it says, the Vatican draws its income from the voluntary contributions of more than one billion Catholics worldwide, from interest on investments and from the sale of stamps, coins and publications. Both descriptions are correct, and the stamps and coins appear in both because the state issues them and the Holy See is its sovereign.

The published record is uneven between the two. For 2025 the Holy See's patrimony office and its bank both released detailed results, and Vatican News reported them in May and July 2026. For the state, the most recent result on file is older. Wikipedia records that Vatican City State had a surplus of 6.7 million euros in 2007 and a deficit of more than 15 million euros in 2008. The table sets the bodies side by side with the latest figure each has on record.

How the two bodies are governed is a separate question. What follows is where each one's money comes from and where it goes.

What the state sells inside its walls

The Governorate's economic machinery is written into law. The law on the government of the state, promulgated on 25 November 2018, gives it seven directorates. One of them, the Directorate of the Economy, holds the State Accounting Office, which manages the patrimony, keeps the accounts and budget, runs internal audit and includes the State Mint. The same directorate runs the economic activities: the commercial activities, the marketing of stamps and coins to collectors, the customs service and the transit of goods, and the motor pool. Another directorate carries the post and philately, and a third, the Directorate of Museums and Cultural Heritage, conserves the collections and draws up projects for their reproduction and economic use.

The Vatican Pharmacy sits inside the health directorate with technical and administrative autonomy; under the 2018 law it supplies and distributes pharmaceutical products and makes and sells medicines of its own.

The state collects no income tax. Britannica records that there is none and no restriction on moving funds in or out, and Wikipedia adds that goods are sold duty-free. Almost everything consumed on the territory arrives from Italy: Britannica lists food, water, electricity and gas as imported. The customs and goods-transit service in the Directorate of the Economy handles what crosses that border.

The ground limits what can be produced on it. About half of it is built on and the rest is open space and gardens, and none of the land is set aside for agriculture or for extracting natural resources, according to Wikipedia's geography entry. Wikipedia names three activities beyond the shops and the museums: printing, the making of mosaics and the manufacture of staff uniforms.

How the museums carry the state's budget

Admission to most of the territory is free. St Peter's Square and the basilica are open without charge, tickets for papal general audiences are issued free, and there is no general public access to the gardens, which are seen only on guided tours for small groups. The Vatican Museums, which include the Sistine Chapel, usually charge an entrance fee. Of the six entrances in the walls, Britannica counts three open to the public, and one of those is the museum door in the north wall. It is the entrance at which the state charges admission.

Wikipedia's tourism entry gives about 4.3 million visitors to the museums in 2007 and more than five million a year by 2011. The Art Newspaper's annual survey, published on 31 March 2026, put the Vatican Museums at 6.9 million visitors in 2025, against more than 9 million at the Louvre and 5.3 million across the Uffizi's three sites in Florence.

The collections were built as a public institution well before the state existed. The Pio Clementino Museum takes its name from Clement XIV (1769 to 1774) and Pius VI (1775 to 1799), who oversaw its foundation in the second half of the 18th century as a museum in the modern sense, open to the public and charged with safeguarding antique works. Under the Treaty of Tolentino in 1797 the Papal States had to hand its principal masterpieces to Napoleon, and most were recovered after 1815 through the diplomacy of the sculptor Antonio Canova, the museum's own history records.

Almost 33.5 million pilgrims came to Rome during the Jubilee of 2025, from 185 countries, according to figures given at the Vatican on 5 January 2026; Roma Tre University had projected about 31 million. That count covers Rome and its four papal basilicas, three of which lie outside the state, and no separate figure for the state's own receipts from the year has been published in the sources on file.

Why Vatican coins and stamps sell abroad

A state with 882 residents on 31 December 2024 prints postage and strikes coins for a much larger market. The postal service, Poste Vaticane, was created on 13 February 1929, two days after the treaty was signed, and the state began issuing its own stamps on 1 August 1929 under the Philatelic and Numismatic Office. The Governorate's own description of the state records that it strikes its own money, currently the euro, and issues its own postage stamps.

The currency is the euro under a special agreement with the European Union, used since January 1999, with euro coins and notes in circulation from 1 January 2002. The state issues no banknotes. The number of euro coins it may issue is strictly limited by treaty, with more allowed in a year when a new pope is elected, and Wikipedia records that the scarcity makes the coins sought after by collectors. Before the euro, Vatican coins and stamps were denominated in a Vatican lira held at par with the Italian lira.

Coins that collectors buy and keep leave circulation, and the state sells them through its own numismatic service. The 2018 law places the mint in the State Accounting Office and the sale of stamps and coins to collectors in the commercial side of the same directorate, so the product and its market sit under one director.

Who works in the Vatican and for whom

The workforce is far larger than the population. Wikipedia describes Vatican City State as employing nearly 2,000 people in the same passage that gives its 2007 surplus, and says the territory receives thousands of workers every day as well as tourists. Almost none of them live inside the walls: the 882 residents counted on 31 December 2024 are clergy, members of religious orders, lay staff such as the Swiss Guard and their families. Wikipedia records that the incomes and living standards of lay workers are comparable to those of counterparts working in the city of Rome. The employer depends on the office. The gendarmerie, the firefighters, the gardeners and the museum staff work for the state, under the directorates set out in the 2018 law. The Curia's dicasteries and the Holy See's diplomats work for the Holy See, and so do Vatican Radio, brought under the Holy See's Dicastery for Communication in 2015, and the Vatican Printing Press, founded in 1587, and Vatican Publishing House, founded in 1926, which the same dicastery manages.

The Holy See's patrimony office reported that around 40% of its own staff in 2025 worked for other bodies of the Holy See, largely free of charge. In that year it handled 4,417 procurement requests as the central purchasing body, only a quarter of them for its own needs, kept the accounts of 77 entities and processed more than 50,000 payments.

What the Holy See's patrimony office holds

The Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, known as APSA, manages the Holy See's property and investments, and Wikipedia records that it was designated the Vatican's central bank in 2014. Its accounts for 2025, reported by Vatican News on 31 July 2026, describe an institution whose stated purpose is to preserve its capital, with no annual profit target.

How gold and property raised the net assets

Net assets stood at €2.686 billion at the end of 2025, up by about €89 million from €2.597 billion in 2024. Three items produced most of the rise: the revaluation of the physical gold in the portfolio added €40.8 million, the higher value of real estate added €39.2 million and the valuation of securities added €16.3 million.

The portfolio in 2025 held about 17% in equities, 32% in bonds and 29% in physical gold, with a cash buffer. Its return was 14.37%. Under the Holy See's new accounting standards, the Vatican Financial Management Policy, changes in portfolio value now go straight into net assets, so about €16 million of realised returns never reached the income statement. The accounts therefore show an accounting loss of €3.7 million on the portfolio, against an actual result of about €12.6 million.

APSA manages 4,281 property units in Italy and about 1,200 more in London, Paris, Geneva and Lausanne through wholly owned companies. The real estate result in 2025 was €44.5 million, €9.4 million better than the year before, and a three-year plan for 2025 to 2027 is selling properties the office classes as non-strategic to reinvest in assets with higher yields.

What the office pays to keep the Curia running

The operating result for 2025 was €22.8 million, down from €62.2 million in 2024, a year the office described as boosted by the restructuring of its portfolio. Out of it APSA paid €22.7 million to cover the needs of the Roman Curia, the full contribution requested. What remained was a surplus of €155,000, added in full to net assets.

None of that transfer passes through the state's budget.

The projects APSA named for 2026 point the same way: the Fratello Sole agrivoltaic project at Santa Maria di Galeria and the redevelopment of the Domus Paolo VI.

How the Vatican bank earns the pope's dividend

The Institute for the Works of Religion, the IOR, is the institution known as the Vatican Bank. It conducts financial business worldwide from inside the state, and its automated teller machines offer instructions in Latin. Its fourteenth annual report, covering 2025, was reported by Vatican News on 11 May 2026.

Net profit in 2025 was €51 million, 55.5% more than in 2024. Net interest income rose to €32.3 million from €29.4 million, commission income held at €26.2 million against €26.5 million, and total operating income reached €66.3 million, up from €51.5 million. The bank's Tier 1 capital ratio stood at 71.9%, and its own equity at €815.3 million, €83.4 million more than a year earlier. Client funds under management, counting deposits, current accounts, managed portfolios and securities in custody, reached €5.9 billion on 31 December 2025, against €5.7 billion in 2024.

The report presents the institute as an asset manager for Catholic institutions and investors. It describes growth in 2025 in the number of religious congregations banking with the institute and in those that handed it their assets to manage, with the institute working alongside more than 11 international asset managers.

In February 2026 it launched two equity indices with Morningstar built to follow Catholic social teaching.

The accounts received an unqualified audit opinion from Deloitte & Touche and were approved unanimously by the supervisory board on 28 April 2026, then passed to a commission of cardinals. That commission decided to pay the pope a dividend of €24.3 million, 76.1% more than for 2024, in line with the institute's mission to support works of religion and charity. The dividend goes to the head of the Church as such. The state's budget has no line for it.

Why the finances were placed under new controls

Britannica records that Vatican banking operations and expenditures have been reported publicly since the early 1980s. A Wikipedia figure from 2001 gives the Holy See revenue of 422.098 billion Italian lire that year, about US$202 million at the time, and net income of 17.720 billion lire, about US$8 million.

In 2012 the United States Department of State's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report listed Vatican City for the first time among the jurisdictions of concern for money laundering, in its middle category. In the same year, according to a Guardian report cited by Wikipedia, a Council of Europe report valued one section of the Holy See's property assets at more than €680 million.

In February 2014 the Vatican announced a Secretariat for the Economy, responsible for all economic, financial and administrative activity of both the Holy See and the state, with Cardinal George Pell at its head. It followed charges of money laundering against two senior clerics. Francis appointed an auditor-general with power to audit any agency at any time, engaged a United States financial services firm to review the Vatican's 19,000 accounts for compliance with international anti-money-laundering practice, and gave APSA the functions of a central bank.

Some international commitments remain unsigned. Wikipedia records that the state has not signed the OECD's Common Reporting Standard, the OECD framework aimed at preventing tax evasion and money laundering. APSA's 2025 accounts were drawn up under the new Vatican Financial Management Policy, and the IOR's report credits stronger governance, internal controls and tax transparency for the congregations it has gained.

What the papacy lived on before the treaty

Before 1870 the popes governed the Papal States across central Italy and taxed them. In 1729 annual income stood at about 2.7 million scudi against about 2.4 million in expenditure, and tax exemptions and salary rises soon turned that into a recurring deficit of about 120,000 scudi a year, according to Wikipedia's history of the Papal States. The French invasions added indemnities: the Treaty of Tolentino in 1797 imposed 30 million lire. In the 19th century the Papal States raised about 13.5 million florins a year, roughly 10 million of it from indirect taxes, against a public debt of about 187 million florins.

After Italian troops took Rome, the Law of Guarantees of 1871 offered the popes a yearly income of 3,250,000 lire, and they refused it. The settlement came with the financial convention annexed to the Lateran Treaty in 1929, under which Italy paid 750,000,000 lire in cash and handed over Italian 5% bonds as a definitive settlement of the claims arising from 1870; the history of that settlement covers its terms. Since then the Holy See has drawn its income, in Britannica's list, from the contributions of Catholics, from interest on investments and from the sale of stamps, coins and publications, and the state has drawn its own from what visitors buy.