What is the cost of bilingualism is Wales?
There is an important difficulty with this question as there is no single official figure for the cost. The Welsh Government does not generally identify the additional cost of providing a service in Welsh alongside English. Much of the expenditure is embedded in ordinary departmental, local-authority and BBC budgets.
Broadcasting is by far the largest identifiable item
For 2026-27, S4C is receiving about £100 million a year from the television licence fee. The Government says that S4C's public funding is entirely derived from the licence fee.
There is also a substantial BBC contribution which is not included in that £100 million cash figure. S4C receives programmes supplied by the BBC, valued at about £20 million a year.
BBC Cymru Wales itself is considerably larger. The BBC's 2025-26 figures show:
● £216 million total BBC spending in Wales;
● of which £69 million was spent on BBC Wales's own services;
● and £93 million on network programmes made in Wales.
The £216 million is not all Welsh-language expenditure. It includes English-language BBC Wales television, radio and other production, as well as Welsh-language services.
The BBC's own Welsh-language services therefore cannot simply be assigned the whole £216 million.
However, there is a recent figure from evidence given to the House of Commons Welsh Affairs Committee. BBC Wales representatives said that BBC Cymru Wales plus the BBC network operation in Wales represented about £214 million of expenditure, and that adding S4C's approximately £98 million licence-fee funding brought the total to about £312 million.
So roughly £300 million a year is now being spent through the BBC/S4C system in Wales, but it would be wrong to call all of that "the cost of the Welsh language".
Welsh Government's direct Welsh-language expenditure
The Welsh Government's Cymraeg 2050 programme is a separate and much smaller category. Its indicative budget for 2025-26 was £57.2 million.
This money is not principally the cost of translating government material. It is a language-development programme: Welsh-medium education, learning Welsh, language planning, grants to organisations, etc.
For example, the 2026-27 budget includes money for the Welsh Language Commissioner and national Welsh-language organisations, while the Welsh-in-education elements include support for Welsh-medium childcare, Welsh-medium education and immersion programmes.
There is also a £15 million-a-year Welsh-medium capital grant planned for 2026-27 to 2028-29.
So it would be misleading to add the £57 million to the BBC figure and describe the result as the "cost of bilingualism". Much of the £57 million is expenditure intended to increase the number of Welsh speakers, rather than to provide an English service and an additional Welsh service.
Road signs
In 1979 the Government estimated that putting Welsh on trunk-road signs, rather than having English-only signs, cost an additional £150,000 in 1977-78 and £160,000 in 1978-79.
By 1979 the estimated additional cost of bilingual signs on trunk roads since 1974 was about £600,000, with an estimated current-year cost of £160,000. But the Government explicitly said that it could not identify the cost on other roads because those were the responsibility of highway authorities.
More recently, however, the Welsh Government no longer seems to maintain a comprehensive national accounting of the incremental cost of bilingual signs. Road expenditure is generally accounted for as highway expenditure rather than "Welsh-language expenditure".
There is also a significant conceptual point here: most road signs would have to exist whether they were bilingual or not. The cost attributable specifically to Welsh is therefore the extra sign size, manufacture, installation, replacement and perhaps design/maintenance costs, not the entire cost of the sign.
Government documents, forms and leaflets
This is probably the category for which the least reliable figure exists.
As long ago as 1978 the Government explicitly stated that it was not possible to identify separately the expenditure incurred by government departments and other public bodies in providing bilingual forms and publications.
The same problem exists today. Welsh-language standards require public bodies to provide substantial amounts of information and services in Welsh. The Welsh Government describes its objective as providing "high quality bilingual services on all occasions".
But that does not mean there is a budget line saying, for example, "£X million spent translating English documents into Welsh".
A document may be:
● written simultaneously in English and Welsh;
● translated from one language into the other;
● produced by a bilingual employee;
● translated by an in-house translation service;
● translated by an external contractor;
● or produced only in Welsh or only in English where the rules permit this.
Consequently, the marginal cost of bilingual government is buried within personnel, translation, printing, web-design and administration budgets.
Summary
| Area | Approximate annual expenditure |
|---|---|
| S4C licence-fee funding | £100m |
| BBC programmes supplied to S4C | ~£20m |
| BBC expenditure in Wales | £216m |
| Welsh Government Cymraeg 2050 | ~£57m |
| Bilingual road signs | Not separately identified |
| Bilingual government documents/services | Not separately identified |
| Local-authority bilingual services | Not separately identified nationally |