Data Sources
The NYS Office of the State Comptroller
collects Annual Financial Reports (AFRs) from local governments across New York State.
NY Benchmark imports this data for all 62 cities. Of these, 61 have filed at least once
since 1995. The remaining city — New York City — has its own Comptroller and
is not part of the OSC reporting system. We plan to import NYC data from
Checkbook NYC in a future release.
As of the most recent filing year (2024), 57 cities have submitted data. Four cities are
late or non-filing.
The OSC dataset includes revenue, expenditure, and balance sheet data at the fund and
account-code level, totaling over 647,000 individual observations.
Population, income, poverty, and housing data comes from the
American Community Survey
(5-year estimates) via the Census Bureau API. This covers all 62 cities (including NYC)
since 2012, totaling over 14,000 observations.
ACS 5-year estimates are based on survey samples and carry margins of error.
For small cities, these margins can be significant. We use point estimates
throughout the application.
How Metrics Are Calculated
The three headline metrics used in city rankings and entity dashboards are derived
from OSC and Census data:
- Fund Balance %
-
Unassigned Fund Balance (account code A917) divided by Total Expenditures, expressed
as a percentage. A higher fund balance generally indicates stronger fiscal reserves.
- Debt Service %
-
Total Debt Service (all accounts in the Debt Service category) divided by Total
Expenditures, expressed as a percentage. A lower percentage typically indicates
less debt burden.
- Per-Capita Spending
-
Total Expenditures divided by population (from Census ACS data). Provides a
normalized comparison of spending across cities of different sizes.
All-Fund Approach
Expenditure and revenue totals include all fund types (General, Highway, Water, Sewer,
Enterprise, etc.) with two exclusions:
-
Trust & Custodial Fund (T-fund) — Cities in Westchester and Nassau
counties act as tax collectors for county and school district taxes. These pass-through
amounts are reported in the T-fund and can inflate apparent expenditures by 40-50%.
We exclude the entire T-fund to remove these pass-throughs.
-
Interfund Transfers — When cities move money between funds, OSC
reports these as expenditures ("Other Uses") and revenues ("Other Sources") at the
fund level. Cities' own ACFRs eliminate these in government-wide statements. We do
the same to prevent double-counting.
Fund Structure Variation
Cities organize their finances differently. Some run water and sewer operations through
the General Fund (A), while others use dedicated Enterprise (E), Water (F), and Sewer (G)
funds. Debt service may appear in any fund. The all-fund approach handles this correctly
by including all legitimate spending regardless of fund structure.