Conditionalities, measures that a borrowing country should adopt to obtain loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), are pervasive in IMF programs. Empirical work on the determinants of IMF conditionalities typically employs indicators based on the number of conditions as proxies for program austerity. This paper estimates the effects of political and economic factors on a different measure of stringency of conditionality: the fiscal balance requested in an agreement. The correlation between the number of conditions and the requested fiscal adjustment is close to zero in our sample. The requested adjustment is strongly linked to the country's fiscal deficit but is also affected by politics. For middle‐income and upper‐income countries, political alignment with the US has a significant negative effect on the fiscal effort required by the IMF.