In 2018, EUR 775 736 640 was allocated for social protection benefits, which is an increase by 1.8 percentage compared to 2017. Total social protection expenditures increased due to the increase in total expenditures for social protection benefits in the function Sickness/Health care, function Old age, function Unemployment and function Social exclusion not elsewhere classified. In 2018, the amount of social protection benefits representing 97.0 percentage of the total social protection expenditure, which is at approximately the same level as in the previous year. By type of social protection, in 2018, the largest share of the total social protection expenditure refers to function Old age EUR 300 108 501, i.e. 39.9%, while function Sickness/Health care EUR 222 727 721 i.e. 29.6%. The third group by the amount of expenditures on social protection benefits was function Survivors, amounted EUR 90 631 927, i.e. 12.0%, followed function Disability and function Family/ Children. Compared to the previous year, in 2018, an increase of expenditures in total expenditures for social protection benefits were in the function Sickness / Health care (by 2.0 percentage points), function Old age (by 0.8 percentage points), function Social exclusion not elsewhere classified (by 0.3 percentage points) and function Unemployment (by 0.1 percentage points). On the other hand, expenditures for the function Family/Children decreased (by 3.3 percentage points), while for the function Disability and function Survivors remained the same (Table 1). The share of the total social protection expenditures in the Gross domestic product of Montenegro (GDP) in 2018 was 16.6%, which is a decrease by 1.1 percentage points compared to 2017. Despite the nominal growth of total social protection expenditures in 2018, the share of social protection expenditures in the Gross domestic product of Montenegro (GDP) in 2018 decreased, due to the nominal growth of gross domestic product in 2018 by 8.5% (Table 2).
In all social protection functions in Montenegro, excluding the function Sickness/Health care, the largest share of all social protection benefits was allocated to cash benefits (Table 3).
The largest share of social protection benefits by function non-means tested in 2017 and 2018 refer to function Sickness/Health care, function Disability and function Unemployment. (Table 4).

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