This article is devoted to the study of fiscal and legal incentives and restrictions as paired categories. The author formulates definitions of these phenomena in the broad and narrow senses. Based on these definitions, as well as using the algorithm used in legal theory for studying the pairing of legal categories, the author studies fiscal and legal incentives and restrictions in their unity and opposition. Based on the conducted research, the work highlights the features of incentives and restrictions in budget law, which characterize them as independent legal phenomena. The identified features, as well as the practice of their consolidation and implementation, allowed the author to formulate his own position on the issue of understanding incentives and restrictions as independent phenomena of budget law.