Methods

What this is

Per-resident revenue and spending for U.S. state, county, city and township governments, from the Census of Governments, in real 2024 dollars . Every figure is divided by that year's Census F-33 population.

Scope

Fiscal years 1967–2024, Census government types 0–3: states, counties, municipalities and townships. There is no source data for FY1968 or FY1969.

School districts (type 5) and special districts (type 4) are not in this corpus. A search for a school district returns nothing because the district is excluded, not because it is missing from its state. Where a service is run by a special district rather than by the government you are looking at, the spending will not appear here at all.

The Census of Governments is quinquennial, so most governments report only in years ending in 2 and 7. Points on a chart are observations; a segment drawn between two distant points is interpolation rather than data, and is drawn dashed to say so.

Coverage at the recent end is uneven for the same reason. 2022 was a full census year, and roughly three quarters of governments in this corpus have no record after it; 2023 and 2024 come from the Census Bureau's Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances, which reaches only the largest governments outside census years.

What the page tells you about itself

• Categories too small to plot are named below the grid, never silently dropped, and clicking one brings it into the grid.
• Categories you exclude are listed in a separate strip, because your editorial choice and the data's own silence are different things.
• A series that stops before its neighbours is flagged through YYYY in the card header as well as in its label.
• Government-years with no Census F-33 population denominator are dropped before anything is summed, and the count is disclosed. Summing an all-missing year would otherwise produce a confident $0 rather than a visible gap.
• Cards marked agg rely on an aggregate code in at least one year.

Source

U.S. Census of Governments, via the Civilytics COG Finance API at cog-api.civilytics.org . Corpus documentation and bulk downloads are linked from there.

The API is called from the server, not from your browser, and the page loads nothing from a third party: the typefaces are served with the app rather than fetched from Google.