New York Benchmarking Project
Civic reform through benchmarking.
The New York Benchmarking Project benchmarks financial and demographic data across New York State’s local governments — covering 62 cities, 57 counties, 933 towns, 558 villages, and 689 school districts — making it easy for residents, journalists, researchers, and policymakers to compare how they raise and spend public money.
Interactive scatter charts tracking fiscal and environmental stress trajectories for every city, county, town, village, and school district since 2012.
New York City — 40% of the state's population, $109.6B in expenditures — is now in the dataset. 10 years of audited actuals from the NYC Comptroller's ACFR.
Query the full dataset from Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or any MCP client. Domain-aware caveats included automatically.
Ranked fiscal health metrics, trend charts, and per-capita breakdowns for all 62 cities.
Interactive scatter plots across per-pupil spending, overhead, and state aid.
NY Benchmark imports bulk data from the NYS Office of the State Comptroller (city and county financials since 1995, school district financials since 2012), the NYC Comptroller (NYC ACFR data, FY 2016-2025), the U.S. Census Bureau (population, income, poverty), and the OSC Fiscal Stress Monitoring System (fiscal and environmental stress scores). 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 and enrollment, computing key ratios, and presenting it in comparative dashboards. The full dataset is also available to AI tools via MCP.
Coming soon: NYSED outcomes data (graduation rates, test scores), side-by-side city comparisons, metric-specific leaderboards, and category drill-downs.
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