Research · September 2026
How America’s local governments publish their budgets.
We looked for the published budget of every county, city, town and township in the United States: 38,736 governments. This is what we found.
Key findings
12,452
governments had a budget online that we could read.
83%
of those were made with basic office tools or a finance-system export, or scanned from paper. 11% used a budgeting platform or a designed book.
71%
of the 11,171 budget PDFs we analyzed had no accessibility tags. 3,223 were scans with no text at all.
13%
of dated budgets online were older than the government’s last fiscal year.
By size
Small governments are the least likely to have a budget online at all.
Most governments under 2,500 people publish nothing we could find. From 10,000 people up, a budget online is the norm, but most are still basic documents or scans.
| How the budget is published | Under 1,000 | 1,000–2,500 | 2,500–10,000 | 10,000–50,000 | 50,000–150,000 | 150,000+ | All |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Modern: a budgeting platform or a designed book | 14 | 24 | 167 | 611 | 370 | 244 | 1,430 |
| Basic: an office document or finance-system export | 1,072 | 1,158 | 2,026 | 2,038 | 565 | 238 | 7,097 |
| A paper scan | 505 | 685 | 1,034 | 772 | 182 | 45 | 3,223 |
| A PDF of unclear origin | 72 | 105 | 178 | 208 | 74 | 65 | 702 |
| Not online (no budget found, or no website) | 14,871 | 4,272 | 2,772 | 1,047 | 131 | 20 | 23,113 |
| Not checked (site blocked our crawler or was down) | 1,203 | 798 | 957 | 208 | 1 | 4 | 3,171 |
| All governments | 17,737 | 7,042 | 7,134 | 4,884 | 1,323 | 616 | 38,736 |
Columns are population. A budget is “modern” when it was made on a budgeting platform or laid out in design software, judged from how the file was made.
By type of government
Counties publish most; townships least.
Three in four townships have no budget online that we could find. Counties are the most likely to publish one, and the most likely to publish a modern one.
| Type of government | Governments | Modern | Basic | Scan | Unclear | Not online | Not checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Counties | 3,031 | 9% | 35% | 18% | 5% | 27% | 7% |
| Municipalities | 19,491 | 5% | 21% | 9% | 2% | 52% | 11% |
| Townships | 16,214 | 1% | 12% | 6% | 1% | 75% | 5% |
How we did it
Method and limits
We started from the Census Bureau’s 2022 list of general-purpose governments: 3,031 counties, 19,491 municipalities and 16,214 townships. We found official websites from the federal .gov registry, Census records, public data and our own searches, then read each site for its most recent budget.
Each budget file was classified by how it was made, from its document properties and fonts: an office program, a finance-system export, a budgeting platform, design software, or a scanner. In Virginia, every locality the automated pass couldn’t settle was checked by hand. Elsewhere the work was automated, with spot checks and a second look by hand at sites that blocked automated reading.
Audit timeliness comes from the Federal Audit Clearinghouse, which holds the single audits of governments that spend $750,000 or more of federal money in a year ($1 million from fiscal 2025).
Limits
- 15,349 governments have no website we could find, and 3,171 sites blocked our crawler or were down.
- “Not online” means we couldn’t find a budget, not that none exists. Many small governments publish on paper only.
- In our spot checks, the automated choice of budget document was right roughly 85 to 90 percent of the time.
We publish totals only. We don’t rank or name individual governments.
Want to know where your budget stands?
We’ll check your published budget for free and tell you what a resident, or a screen reader, would run into.