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. The goal is to make it easy for residents, journalists, researchers, and policymakers to compare how their governments raise and spend public money, identify best practices, understand outliers, and improve public performance.

This project is nonpartisan and evidence-based. Data is imported from official government sources — the NYS Office of the State Comptroller and the U.S. Census Bureau — and every data point traces to its source so that claims can be verified and debated on the merits.

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 explorer

The application at app.nybenchmark.org currently serves 661,000+ observations covering 62 cities, with ranked dashboards, per-city trend charts, and derived fiscal health metrics (Fund Balance %, Debt Service %, Per-Capita Spending).

What is coming next

  • Side-by-side city comparisons — Compare two or more cities on any metric across years
  • Metric leaderboards — Rank all cities on specific spending categories (police, fire, debt service, and more)
  • NYC data — Import from Checkbook NYC to bring the largest city into the dataset
  • Towns, villages, counties, and special districts — Expanding beyond cities using OSC data for all local government types
  • 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 contribute, please contact: