Albania has undertaken two decentralization reforms in separate times in the post-communist period. The first was in the late 1990s and the second with the territorial reform of 2014. The main idea behind the territorial reform of 2014 was achieving a real decentralization after some previous not substantial efforts, to offer to the new 61 municipalities and 12 regional authorities (districts) more financial autonomy to carry out the functions devolved to them, based on the principle that national budgetary policies should ensure that local authorities are adequately funded and that they should have a wide range of income sources. The financial systems, on which resources available to local authorities are based, shall be of a sufficiently diversified and of a flexible nature, enabling them to manage the real evolution of the cost of carrying out their tasks. The purpose of this paper is to examine the dynamics and structure of financial resources as well as the expenses of the municipalities by comparing the two time periods of the implementation of the new administrative reform 2015-2018 and 2019-2021, using the Mann Whitney Wilcoxon test. It turns out that there are no statistically significant differences regarding the structure of financial resources and expenses of the municipalities in the two time periods. From the comparison of the two time periods, it is noted that capital expenditures have decreased while current expenditures have increased. This is also due to the reallocation of financial resources to facilitate the consequences of COVID 19 for Albanian taxpayers. The present paper has not only theoretical and empirical added value by focusing on the Albanian case-study seen through comparative lenses, but also policy-making relevance since it coincides with a new political and public debate on coming up with a new and consensual territorial map.