New York Benchmarking Project
Civic reform through benchmarking.
The New York Benchmarking Project is an open-source effort to benchmark financial and demographic data across New York State’s local governments — starting with 62 cities and expanding to towns, villages, counties, and special districts — making it easy for residents, journalists, researchers, and policymakers to compare how they raise and spend public money.
We import bulk data from the NYS Office of the State Comptroller (61 cities, financial data since 1995) and the U.S. Census Bureau (population, income, poverty), then compute derived metrics like Fund Balance %, Debt Service %, and Per-Capita Spending that make meaningful comparison possible. The OSC does invaluable work collecting standardized financial reports from local governments across the state. NY Benchmark builds on that data by normalizing it for population, computing key ratios, and presenting it in comparative dashboards.
Today: 661,000+ data points covering 62 cities, ranked dashboards, per-city trend charts, and derived fiscal health metrics.
Coming soon: Side-by-side city comparisons, metric-specific leaderboards, category drill-downs (e.g., police spending across all cities), and expansion to NYC, towns, villages, and counties.
Launch the App (app.nybenchmark.org)
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