« City agency budgets

Questions and answers

Correction: years were shown one year late (November 9, 2026)

Until November 9, 2026, every year in this explorer was labeled one year late, for every agency. The amount shown as "Adopted 2026" was really the Fiscal Year 2025 adopted budget, and "Modified 2026" was really the Fiscal Year 2025 modified budget. The dollar amounts themselves came from the City's data unchanged. Only the year they were filed under was wrong.

Why it happened: in the City's dataset, each release is labeled with the fiscal year being budgeted, but its "adopted" and "modified" columns describe the year before. We used that label as the year of every column. We checked the corrected labels against the Mayor's Office of Management and Budget's printed Fiscal Year 2026 Adopted Budget. If you copied numbers from this explorer before November 9, 2026, move each year back by one: what it called 2026 is Fiscal Year 2025.

Where does this data come from?

Every dollar shown here comes from NYC Open Data's Expense Budget dataset (dataset id mwzb-yiwb), published by the City. It is public, and this tool reads it directly. New York City's fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30, and the budget for each fiscal year is published several times as it moves through the year: a Preliminary budget (January), an Executive budget (April or May), and the Adopted budget (June). This tool uses only the June (adopted) release of each year.

What's the difference between "Adopted" and "Modified"?

Adopted is the budget the City adopted for that fiscal year, in June before the year starts. Modified is that same year's budget after the changes made during the year, as recorded in June near the end of the year. The two chart lines let you compare them. For Fiscal Year 2025, for example, the City adopted $114.4 billion and the modified budget reached $123.8 billion. For Fiscal Year 2026, the City adopted $117.8 billion and the modified budget reached $129.2 billion. These totals include money City agencies pay each other, so they run higher than the City's headline figure ($115.9 billion adopted for Fiscal Year 2026).

Each June release of the City's data carries three amounts: the adopted and modified budgets for the year that is ending, and the plan for the year about to start. So this tool takes a year's adopted amount from the June release that adopts it, and its modified amount from the next June's release. For data users, in the dataset's own field names, "Adopted" is financial_plan_amount from the June release tagged with that year, and "Modified" is current_modified_budget_amount from the June release tagged with the next year.

Why Fiscal Years 2017 through 2027?

That is the range of fiscal years currently available in the published Expense Budget dataset. As the City publishes new fiscal years, we can add them by rebuilding the data file.

What are "agency" and "unit of appropriation"?

An agency is a City agency or office in the budget, for example the Department of Education, the Police Department, or a community board (each of the 59 community boards is its own agency in the budget). A unit of appropriation is one of the lines an agency's budget is adopted by, often Personal Services (pay) and Other Than Personal Services (everything else). The chart starts with every agency; open one to see its units of appropriation.

This tool is adapted from DataMade's Look at Cook, built for Cook County, Illinois, which called these "Fund" and "Department". The downloadable file still uses those two column names, Fund for the agency and Department for the unit of appropriation, so files people already use keep working. Department ID is the unit of appropriation's number.

How is the citywide total calculated?

Because each fiscal year is published several times and each publication restates the entire budget, adding every row would count the same money more than once. This tool keeps only the June release for each year, then adds up the budget lines in it. As a check, the Fiscal Year 2026 adopted total comes to $117,791,473,676. That matches the City's printed Fiscal Year 2026 Adopted Budget: a net total of $115,907,309,727, plus $1,884,163,949 that City agencies pay each other ("intra-city" spending). The City's data includes those intra-city amounts, so the totals here are about $1.9 billion higher than the City's headline figure.

Why is the newest year's "Modified" amount missing?

The City publishes a year's modified budget in the June release that adopts the following year. The Fiscal Year 2027 modified amount will appear after the Fiscal Year 2028 budget is adopted, normally in June 2027. Until then this tool shows it as "Not yet published" rather than guessing.