1. Pick A Peer Set
Compare cities with similar scale or pressure.
Start with three to five cities that share size, housing costs, or transit demands so the differences in spend patterns are more meaningful.
2000-2026 Civic Budget Atlas
Rough budget pages for major global cities, built for fast comparison.
Each city page turns official budget books into a simpler, normalized view of how money moved across public safety, housing, infrastructure, and core city operations from 2000 through 2026 in each city's local currency.
City Pages
Start with the biggest municipal operating footprints.
The cards below are rendered from shared budget data. Adding more city pages is now a data-entry task rather than a full layout rewrite.
Method
These are rough comparisons, not audit tables.
Totals are based on official adopted, current, or proposed all-funds city budgets depending on what each city publishes clearly for a given year.
Totals stay in each city's home currency, and the category mix is hand-grouped and rounded to make different city budget books comparable. Percentages are intentionally directional.
Per-resident figures use rough annual population estimates so the totals can be compared on a resident-scale basis as well.
Foreign-city USD equivalents use fixed exchange-rate assumptions from the Federal Reserve H.10 weekly table dated May 22, 2026 and released on May 26, 2026.
Published 2020-2026 anchor rows are shown alongside 2000-2019 backfilled estimates so the longer timeline reads as one consistent series.
Best Next Steps
Use the atlas to narrow the real budget questions worth checking next.
The fastest path is to compare only a few cities, identify the sharpest budget shifts, and then go back to the official books for the exact line items behind those moves.