NYC Budget Explorer

A multi-year visualization of New York City's expense budget, built by BetaNYC. It shows every city agency's budget — broken down by unit of appropriation — across Fiscal Years 2017 through 2027, and compares each agency's adopted budget against its modified budget.

This is an adaptation of DataMade's Look at Cook, a budget-transparency front-end originally built for Cook County, Illinois. The interactive front-end is theirs (MIT-licensed); BetaNYC swapped in New York City's budget data and a data pipeline that produces it. See Attribution.

What it does

• Interactive chart of the citywide budget over 11 fiscal years, with a per-agency and per-unit breakdown table.
• Two series per year: Adopted (the budget as adopted) and Modified (the current modified budget at the adopted snapshot).
• All data downloadable as a single CSV.

Data

• Source: NYC Open Data — Expense Budget, dataset id mwzb-yiwb. Public, no API token.
• Coverage: Fiscal Years 2017–2027.
• Validation: FY2026 adopted total = $114,384,991,832 (~$114.385B), matching the City's published adopted expense budget.

The adopted-snapshot methodology (important)

Each fiscal year is published up to three times — Preliminary (Jan), Executive (Apr/May), and Adopted (June) — and each publication restates the whole budget. Naively summing every row would count the same money up to three times (~$343B for FY2026 instead of ~$114B). The pipeline keeps only the Adopted (latest) snapshot per fiscal year and sums within it. A validation gate aborts the run if the FY2026 total ever falls outside [110B, 118B].

Full column definitions and methodology: data/SCHEMA.md.

Regenerating the data

The cleaned CSV the site loads (data/nyc_budget.csv) is produced by data/nyc_budget_cleanup.py:

python3 data/nyc_budget_cleanup.py

Stdlib only (urllib, csv, json) — no third-party dependencies. Requires Python >=3.11,<3.15. Idempotent and read-only against the API.

Tests:

cd data && python3 -m unittest test_nyc_budget_cleanup

Running the site locally

The front-end is fully static. From the repo root:

python3 -m http.server 8000

Then open http://localhost:8000. js/app.js loads /data/nyc_budget.csv — serving from the repo root is what makes that absolute path resolve.

Layout

index.html, faq.html      front-end pages (masthead adapted for NYC)
js/, css/, lib/, fonts/    Look at Cook front-end (Backbone + Highcharts)
images/                    front-end assets
data/
  nyc_budget_cleanup.py    pipeline: SODA pull -> adopted-snapshot filter -> pivot -> CSV
  test_nyc_budget_cleanup.py  hermetic regression tests (no live API)
  nyc_budget.csv           the cleaned data the site loads
  SCHEMA.md                column + methodology documentation

Configuration

The build-time constants live at the top of js/app.js:

Constant	Value	Note
startYear / endYear	2017 / 2027	fiscal-year range
activeYear	2026	default selected year
municipalityName	New York City Budget	masthead / breadcrumb
apropTitle / expendTitle	Adopted / Modified	chart line labels — must match the CSV column prefixes
dataSource	/data/nyc_budget.csv	the cleaned CSV

Status and known TODOs

This is a working v1. Outstanding items:

• Control Officer is a placeholder (duplicates the agency view). A real second dimension (e.g. object class) would make the second top-level view meaningful.
• BetaNYC brand pass is light. The Look at Cook visual theme is largely intact; a full pass against BetaNYC's brand (color #2359a8, Poppins/Roboto, logo) remains.
• GitHub Pages / hosting is intentionally not configured — left for a maintainer to enable.
• Short Title, Link to Website, and Department Description are empty; they could be populated from an agency reference table.

About BetaNYC

This project is built and maintained by BetaNYC, New York's civic technology and open-data community. We work to improve lives in New York through civic design, technology, data, and public-interest technology.

Come do civic tech with us. We run public events, meetups, and hands-on data classes throughout the year — including NYC School of Data and CityCamp NYC, and we host frequent civic-tech gatherings. See what's coming up on our events calendar.

Sustain this work. This project is free and open source. To help keep this work going and find BetaNYC's tools, please consider donating and becoming a Beta Builder.

Building on this? Tell us!

If you build something with this project, we'd love to hear about it. We can help other New Yorkers find it. BetaNYC publishes a weekly newsletter, This Week in NYC's Civic Technology and Open Data.

• Subscribe to the newsletter to keep up with NYC civic tech, open data, and public-interest technology.
• Built something, or found a story worth sharing? Submit a link for the newsletter and we'll consider it for an upcoming issue.

Related BetaNYC projects

BetaNYC maintains a growing suite of open-source tools for NYC and NYS civic data — see the full directory at beta.nyc/ai-tools.

This visualization is a companion to New York City Budget — machine-readable, reconciled NYC Council discretionary funding (Schedule C), Terms & Conditions, and Section 254 capital data, extracted line-by-line from the Council's adopted-budget PDFs. That repo also ships the @betanyc/nyc-budget-mcp server and a companion Schedule C funding visualization (viz/) built on this same Look at Cook toolkit.

Where this repo shows the citywide expense budget ($114B, every agency), the Schedule C visualization shows Council discretionary funding ($656M) — different datasets, same toolkit.

Attribution

Adapted from Look at Cook by DataMade, Derek Eder, Nick Rougeux, and Open City. The original front-end is © 2019 DataMade and released under the MIT License, preserved here in LICENSE.md. BetaNYC's adaptation — the NYC data pipeline, the cleaned dataset, and the NYC-specific copy — is likewise available under the same terms. If you reuse this, keep the DataMade copyright and license intact.