BenchmarkUSA makes local government financial data comparable and accessible — so that residents, journalists, researchers, and policymakers can see how their governments raise and spend public money, identify best practices, understand outliers, and drive better public performance.

The project began in New York State, benchmarking the state’s 62 cities, and has since expanded to cover towns, villages, counties, and school districts across the state. The data application now lives at benchmarkusa.org to reflect the project’s growing national scope.

BenchmarkUSA is nonpartisan and evidence-based. Data is imported from official public sources — state comptrollers, municipal financial reports, and federal agencies including the U.S. Census Bureau — and every data point traces to its source so that claims can be verified and debated on the merits.

Who is behind this

BenchmarkUSA was created by Benjamin Unger, an anesthesiologist and software developer based in Yonkers, New York.

Ben studied engineering as an undergraduate, then served as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Choluteca, Honduras (1996–1998), where he designed and built gravity-fed and pump-driven water sanitation systems for rural communities. After returning to the United States, he went to medical school, completed an anesthesiology residency, and served in the U.S. military reserves.

He has been building web applications with Ruby on Rails since 2013, starting with Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial and maintaining a production scheduling application since 2014. BenchmarkUSA grew out of the same engineering mindset that drove his Peace Corps work — applying technical tools to build public infrastructure that communities actually need.

Having lived in Ohio, Massachusetts, Honduras, Missouri, Pennsylvania, New York City, and the Boston metro area before settling in Yonkers, Ben has experienced local governance firsthand in communities across the country — from coop boards and neighborhood associations to city halls and county legislatures. That experience shaped a lifelong conviction: government works better when financial data is transparent, comparable, and accessible to the people it serves.

What you will find here

Blog posts explaining the motivation, methods, and findings
A methodology page documenting data sources and principles
A roadmap of what’s built and what’s coming next

The data application

The application at benchmarkusa.org currently serves 15.3 million+ observations covering 62 cities, 57 counties, 933 towns, 558 villages, and 689 school districts, with ranked dashboards, trend charts, fiscal stress analysis, and derived fiscal health metrics (Fund Balance %, Debt Service %, Per-Capita Spending).

What is coming next

National expansion — Extending coverage beyond New York State using Census Bureau and state comptroller data from across the country
Side-by-side comparisons — Compare two or more governments on any metric across years
Metric leaderboards — Rank governments on specific spending categories (police, fire, debt service, and more)
Demographic context — Overlay poverty rates, crime rates, and other variables to make spending comparisons more meaningful

Get in touch

If you have corrections, suggested sources, or want to collaborate: