What the city spends
Everything the city spent each year, split three ways: day-to-day operations, debt service on money already borrowed and capital construction. Fiscal years run July through June.
The two hatched bars are not audited. Fiscal 2026 closed on June 30, 2026, but its audited report is not published until the autumn; until then the figure shown is the city's own year-end estimate, the fiscal 2026 budget as modified in June 2026. Fiscal 2027 is the adopted budget for the year now under way. Both come from the Office of Management and Budget, whose expense budget covers operations and debt service but not capital construction, so those two bars are shorter by construction than the audited bars beside them. On the like-for-like measure of operations plus debt service, the city spent $117.7 billion in fiscal 2025, expects about $126.8 billion for fiscal 2026 and has budgeted $126.2 billion for fiscal 2027. This chart splits every year the same three ways; for the full category breakdown of the two budget years, see what it spends it on below.
Sources: Comptroller, annual comprehensive financial reports (fiscal 2005, 2015 and 2025 statistical sections) · Office of Management and Budget, adopted budget for fiscal 2027.
What it spends it on
The same money, grouped by what it buys. Switch between the operating budget and the capital program — they buy very different things.
Sources: Comptroller, annual comprehensive financial reports (General Fund and Capital Projects Fund expenditure schedules) · Office of Management and Budget, adopted budget for fiscal 2027 (agency expense budget summaries).
How the building gets paid for
Capital work is financed mostly by borrowing. This is what the city issued in bonds each year, next to what it actually spent on construction and the federal and state aid that helped cover it.
Refunding bonds, which refinance existing debt rather than raise new money, are excluded; bond premium is included in proceeds. Issuance covers all the city's governmental funds, including the Transitional Finance Authority, not general obligation bonds alone. Money is borrowed when markets are favorable, not when shovels move, so issuance and construction spending should track each other over years rather than match year by year.
Source: Comptroller, annual comprehensive financial reports (changes in fund balances and Capital Projects Fund schedules).
Where the money comes from
The revenue side of the same ledger: the tax mix, plus aid from Albany and Washington.
The hatched fiscal 2026 and 2027 columns are the revenue side of the adopted budget, grouped to match these bands: sales includes mortgage recording and cigarette taxes, business is corporation plus unincorporated plus utility, and the groups balance to the budget's printed total. Two mapping notes: pass-through entity tax sits inside personal income there, and audit revenue and new tax programs sit in other taxes.
Federal aid includes one-time surges — stimulus after the 2008 financial crisis, Covid-19 relief from 2020 to 2023 — so swings in that band are often Washington's calendar, not the city's. This is General Fund revenue: federal and state grants that reimburse capital construction arrive in a separate fund and appear in the borrowing section, not here.
Source: Comptroller, annual comprehensive financial reports (General Fund revenues schedule).
Growth, from any year to any year
Pick two fiscal years and a measure. The result respects the toggles at the top of the page, so it can answer the question four ways: raw dollars, per resident, inflation-adjusted or both.
Audited years only, so fiscal 2000 through 2025. Change the toggles at the top of the page to switch the basis. Two-point growth is sensitive to the endpoints you pick: starting in a recession year or ending in a stimulus year can flatter or understate a trend, so try shifting each end a year or two before drawing conclusions. Individual departments carry an extra caution: functions move between agencies when government reorganizes, so a department's long-run growth can reflect reshuffling as much as real change.
Source: Comptroller, annual comprehensive financial reports.
Set against the size of the economy
Spending grows; so does the city. This is everything the city spends measured against gross domestic product for the five boroughs, which is what the local economy actually produced that year.
Gross domestic product is the Bureau of Economic Analysis county series, summed across the five boroughs, in current dollars. A city fiscal year straddles two calendar years, so each one is measured against the average of the two it spans. Both sides of the ratio are in the same year's dollars, so the inflation and per-person toggles do not change it. The series starts in fiscal 2002 because the county accounts begin in 2001, and stops at fiscal 2024 because calendar 2025 has not been measured yet. Two cautions: county output is measured where the work happens, so Manhattan's figure counts what commuters produce, and this ratio is not the share of New Yorkers' income taken by the city. County-level GDP is also estimated with wider error bands than the national accounts, and recent years are revised as source data arrive.
Sources: Bureau of Economic Analysis, county gross domestic product (CAGDP1) · Comptroller, annual comprehensive financial reports.
Where these numbers come from
The books, not the budget. Fiscal years 2000 through 2025 are audited actuals from the New York City Comptroller's Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, the city's audited annual accounts. Each report's statistical section carries ten-year trend schedules, so three reports — fiscal 2005, fiscal 2015 and fiscal 2025 — cover the full period without gaps.
Operating spending is the General Fund, the city's operating budget, taken from the schedule of General Fund expenditures by agency and totalled by function. Debt service is the General Fund's transfers to the debt service funds. Capital spending is the Capital Projects Fund expenditures schedule. Revenue is the General Fund revenues schedule, which is the only one that separates federal from state aid.
Where pensions and retiree health care live. Pension contributions are their own category. The city budgets them centrally, so the line covers all five retirement systems, including teachers — which means the education category is salaries and operations, not teacher pensions. Retiree health care has no line of its own in the fund statements: the city pays it as it goes, inside health insurance and other benefits, and discloses the amount in the notes — about $4.1 billion in fiscal 2025, up from $3.2 billion a year earlier. The two categories together are the cost of past and present labor beyond wages: about $18.6 billion in fiscal 2025, or 16 cents of every operating dollar.
One caution on the totals. Total spending here is operations plus debt service plus capital construction — a gross cash view. Debt service is mostly the financing of past capital projects, so the total counts this year's construction and the payments on earlier construction in the same figure. That is the standard way to present a city's full footprint, but it is not the figure to use for questions like “what does a year of city government cost,” where you would take either capital or debt service, not both.
Why revenues and spending do not quite match. The city's budget must balance, and in most years General Fund revenues and uses differ by only a few million dollars after the roll of each year's surplus. Fiscal 2021 and 2022 are the visible exceptions: the city banked surpluses into its rainy-day fund, so revenues exceed spending by up to $1.3 billion in those years. That gap is in the audited statements, not an extraction error.
Every category is a line the Comptroller publishes. Nothing is estimated, modelled or allocated. The only arithmetic is addition, and every sum is checked against the report's own printed total for that year; the build fails if any year is off by more than a thousand dollars. Categories shown as "all other" are named individually in the downloadable data.
Population is Census Bureau county estimates for the five boroughs, using the decennial-anchored series — intercensal estimates for 2000 to 2010 and 2010 to 2020 and Vintage 2025 estimates thereafter — so the joins fall on census years. City fiscal years end June 30 and Census estimates are dated July 1, so each fiscal year uses the estimate dated one day after it closed. Inflation uses the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index for all urban consumers in the New York, Newark and Jersey City metropolitan area, averaged over the twelve months of each fiscal year. Adjusted figures are in fiscal 2025 dollars. Two caveats ride along with those choices. Population estimates are revised after every census, and the 2020 to 2025 figures are still provisional; per-resident figures also divide by people who live here, though the city serves commuters and visitors too. And the consumer price index tracks what households buy, not what governments buy — wages, construction and medical costs have often run ahead of it — so "adjusted for inflation" understates cost pressure on some city services.
Why the series starts in fiscal 2000. The Comptroller's schedules reach back to fiscal 1996, but before fiscal 2000 the governmental funds statements reported capital spending on its own line instead of inside each function, so the categories are not comparable across that break. The Census Bureau also no longer publishes the 1990s county estimates needed for a seamless population denominator.
The last two years are budgeted, not audited. Fiscal 2026 closed on June 30, 2026 and its audited report is not published until the autumn; fiscal 2027 is a plan. Both come from the Office of Management and Budget's adopted budget for fiscal 2027 — fiscal 2026 as modified, fiscal 2027 as adopted. Category detail for those two years comes from the same document's agency-level tables, with each agency assigned to a function using the Comptroller's own classification of agency codes; all 141 agencies reconcile to the budget's printed total. The budget basis nets out intra-city transactions and pools citywide costs in its Miscellaneous budget, so it does not tie line for line to the audited series. Per-person figures for those two years reuse the 2025 population, because no later Census estimate has been published.
What was checked against other sources
- The Comptroller's own release on the fiscal 2025 report states General Fund revenues of $117.660 billion and expenditures of $117.690 billion. These figures reproduce both exactly, along with the stated year-over-year changes in total revenue ($4.845 billion), total expenditure ($4.717 billion), tax revenue ($6.139 billion) and state categorical grants ($791 million).
- The Independent Budget Office's published revenue and spending summary overlaps these figures for twenty-one years, fiscal 2000 through fiscal 2020. Total taxes, state categorical aid and federal categorical aid agree in all twenty-one, to the dollar within its $1 million rounding. Total revenues and total expenditures agree in twenty of the twenty-one; the exception is fiscal 2020, discussed below.
- A fourth annual report — fiscal 2016, which was not used to build the series — was extracted independently and compared on thirty measures across fiscal 2007 to fiscal 2016. All thirty matched, which also confirms the city does not restate these schedules.
Discrepancies found, and what they turned out to be
- Federal aid, fiscal 2025. The Comptroller's release reports federal categorical aid falling $2.153 billion; the revenue schedule shows $2.211 billion. A footnote resolves it: the narrative figure folds in federal debt service financing sources, which the revenue schedule reports elsewhere. The $58 million gap is that item.
- Fiscal 2020 and the Independent Budget Office. The office's summary ends at fiscal 2020 and its final column is roughly $700 million below the audited result. The fiscal 2020 annual report itself gives $95.058 billion in revenues, matching the figures used here, so that last column appears to be a pre-audit estimate.
- A bad memo line. The fiscal 2025 report's governmental funds table carries a "less capital outlays" line showing $22.3 billion for fiscal 2022 and $30.3 billion for fiscal 2023 — two to three times the capital expenditure schedule's $10.5 billion and $12.1 billion for the same years, and far out of line with every year around them. The detailed schedule, which reconciles to its own printed total, is used here.
- The Citizens Budget Commission could not be checked directly: its site blocks automated access. Its published growth rates are in any case city-funded budgeted spending, a different measure from audited all-funds actuals, and would not be expected to tie.
Get the data
Full series, comma-separated (all categories, all years) Site data, JSON Comptroller's annual reports OMB budget publications BEA county GDP Census population estimates BLS regional CPI Extraction and build code
Built with AI assistance. The figures are machine-extracted from the published reports and reconciled to their printed totals, but check anything you intend to rely on against the source documents.