With one day left before the deadline to produce a state budget, closed-door negotiations among top state Democrats and Republicans were said to be continuing on Monday but there was no indication a deal had been reached.

If no budget is passed by the end of Tuesday, it will be the fifth year in a row Pennsylvania leaders failed to meet the June 30 deadline. That time frame includes every year of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s three-and-a-half-year tenure.

The Republican-controlled Senate Appropriations Committee on Monday afternoon made a move that appeared to be a technical “positioning” of a bill that could be amended into a vehicle for an agreed-upon budget, should a deal is reached. The bill previously conveyed Shapiro’s $53.3 billion 2026-27 budget as proposed and was approved by the Democratic-controlled House, but on Monday, it was gutted by the Senate committee to include a single item of about $24 million.

It now awaits further action by the full Senate.

“Conversations continue,” Sen. Jay Costa of Allegheny County, the top Democrat in the Senate, said in an interview. He said the execution of a budget deal on the final day of the fiscal year Tuesday could not be ruled out.

Kate Flessner, a spokesperson for Senate Republican Majority Leader Joe Pittman of Indiana County, said — without elaboration — that budget discussions “are still ongoing at this time.”

The use of secretive, closed-door negotiations to produce a budget deal is standard procedure in most states, according to Marc Stier, a consultant who is a longtime observer of the state budget process. He said it is especially true in states like Pennsylvania where one chamber is controlled by Democrats and the other by Republicans.

“The more partisan division there is, the more likely it is to be closely held,” Stier said. “They have to overcome the fundamental differences between the parties first and then fill in the details.”

Last year, no budget was signed until 135 days after the deadline passed. As a result, billions of dollars in state payments to schools and counties were withheld, programs were curtailed and employees were furloughed.

Many rank-and-file lawmakers dislike the pattern of late budgets. On Monday, Republican Rep. Jeremy Shaffer of Allegheny County reiterated in an interview his belief in bills he has sponsored to shake up the process. One would suspend automatic pay raises for the Legislature, governor and lieutenant governor when a budget is not in place on July 1.

“We are constitutionally required to have a budget done by June 30,” Shaffer said. “If we can’t get a budget on time, we don’t get a raise in December.”

The most-delayed budget in recent memory came in 2015, the first year of Gov. Tom Wolf’s eight years as the state’s top executive. Wolf, a Democrat, vetoed a spending plan passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, and no final deal was reached until about nine months later.

Things became more harmonious later under Wolf, and the June 30 deadline was met in three of the final five years of his time in office. In his final year, 2022, he signed budget bills on July 8.

A major blow-up happened in Shapiro’s first year in office in 2023 when he carried out a line-item veto of a single item that would have funded voucher-style scholarships to let students in low-performing public schools attend private ones. Many Republicans blasted the move because Shapiro previously supported the concept.

While the main budget bill was signed on Aug. 3 of that year, some spending flows were disrupted because several budget-related bills were not signed until mid-December.