Santa Barbara, CA
Population: 88,640 (2022) · Small Cities (50K-100K)
Average fiscal health, some areas of concern
Spending Breakdown
Spending data sourced from the Census Bureau's Annual Survey of State & Local Government Finances. Per-capita comparisons use the Lincoln Institute's Fiscally Standardized Cities methodology for fair cross-city benchmarking.
Revenue Sources
Per Capita Spending by Department
Score Breakdown
Debt Overview
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Frequently Asked Questions
Santa Barbara, CA spends $139,120 per resident, based on total expenditures of $12.3B for a population of 88,640. The city has a Fiscal Health Score of C (53/100).
Santa Barbara, CA has total expenditures of $12.3B and total revenue of $4.5B. The city carries $72K in total debt, based on Census Bureau data from 2023.
Santa Barbara, CA employs 0 government workers, of which 0 are full-time. The average government salary is $0, with 0.0 employees per 10,000 residents.
Santa Barbara, CA has a Fiscal Health Score of C (53/100). This score evaluates budget balance, debt burden, pension funding, spending efficiency, revenue diversity, and 3-year fiscal trajectory compared to peer cities of similar population.
The this entity record above pulls directly from the Census Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances. What follows is the per-entity context — how this entity sits in the broader U.S. municipal and county government finances distribution and which underlying factors drive the headline numbers.
The methodology behind every numeric value on this page is publicly documented on the the Census Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances portal and described in detail on this site’s methodology page. Refresh cadence varies by underlying series; the page surfaces the as-of date for each number so readers can trace any figure back to the source release.
Practical use of this page is in combination with the comparison and ranking pages elsewhere on the site, which surface the same data for this entity’s peers within U.S. cities, counties, and states. A single-entity reading without peer context can be misleading when an entity is an outlier on one axis but typical on another.