Legal scholarship on EU funding is a puzzle. It is a surprisingly recent scholarship that only tangentially focuses on the original and central source of EU funding: the EU budget. The first part of this analysis explores why the budget has attracted so little attention in EU legal scholarship and why the budget was overlooked in the recent funding turn in EU legal scholarship. The second part of the analysis makes the case for foregrounding the EU budget in legal scholarship on EU funding. It develops five reasons or paths for focusing more fully on the EU budget: completeness; building on budget-adjacent scholarship; a better guide to new EU directions; adding funding to governance; and understanding rule of law and other conditionalities. It makes the case that it is time for the budget in EU legal scholarship.