Budgetary transparency ensures better communication with the authorities, increases citizens confidence, reduces the possibility of corruption and generally gives citizens a better insight into the situation in society. For this reason, more and more attention is given to budget transparency and it plays an important role in the work of each local unit. The aim of the paper was to determine which political and economic variables most importantly affect the budgetary transparency of all 128 cities and 428 municipalities in the Republic of Croatia. Using Poisson's regression, several models are compiled, the most acceptable being one with three independent variables: party in power (HDZ_vecina), income per capita (doh_st) and surplus or deficit in total revenues (sufdef_pr). Variable HDZ_vecina has a negative impact, whereas doh_st and sufdef_pr have a positive impact on the level of budget transparency. The obtained results are predominantly in line with the hypotheses set. After that, the same analysis was carried out for local units from Slavonia and Baranja where some different results were obtained. In general it can be concluded that the influence of economics over political variables prevails. Income per capita proved to be the variable that has the most significant impact on budget transparency, confirming the results of most researches on this topic.