About CitySpend

Why municipal finance data deserves a public-facing home

The U.S. Census Bureau publishes the Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances — the federal record of every U.S. city, county, and special district’s revenue and expenditure. The data covers thousands of governments, breaks spending into functional categories (public safety, transportation, education, parks, debt service, pensions, capital projects), and is republished annually with the prior fiscal year’s data. The dataset is the only comprehensive source for comparing municipal budgets across cities at scale.

The data is public and free. The official Census interface is built for researchers; the same data presented per-city for a resident, candidate for local office, or civic-tech researcher requires substantial setup work to navigate. CitySpend builds that presentation layer. Every city page shows per-capita spending by functional category, the comparison against the national median and against peer cities, and the multi-year trend in revenue and expenditure. The data is the Census data that has always been public; the value the site adds is the presentation.

How the data pipeline works

The pipeline pulls from the Census Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances Individual Unit File when each new vintage publishes — typically about two years after the fiscal year (the 2023 vintage publishes in late 2025). Every per-city, per-county, and per-state page links back to the underlying Census data table with the as-of date stamped.

The Fiscal Health Score combines six factors: reserve ratio (cash and investments relative to expenditure), debt service ratio (debt payments relative to revenue), pension funding ratio (assets relative to liabilities), spending efficiency (per-capita versus peer-city median), revenue diversity (concentration in any single revenue stream), and the three-year trend in each. The methodology page describes the score with weighted factor scores so a reader who disagrees with the weighting can re-compute.

A practical detail: the Census survey is voluntary, and coverage varies by government type. Cities and counties are well-covered; special-purpose districts and small towns are uneven. The pages flag coverage gaps explicitly rather than imputing values from peer cities.

Where municipal finance data has caveats

Three caveats. First, classification of items like pension contributions and utility revenue varies by state accounting rules. Cross-state comparisons should be read with that in mind; within-state comparisons are more apples-to-apples than across-state.

Second, the Census file reports cash-basis accounting for some categories and accrual-basis for others, which mixes reporting conventions in ways that can produce surprising-looking ratios. The methodology page documents the conventions for each functional category.

Third, the data lag is real. The 2023 vintage publishes in late 2025; any current-year analysis is necessarily working with two-year-old reference data. For time-sensitive analysis, the city’s own published audited financial statements (CAFRs) are the more current reference and supplement the Census aggregate.