Public Money · Budgets
Budget explorer
Open up any local government's FY2026 budget: how much goes into each fund, what the General Fund spends by department, and what each service costs per resident, side by side with the other cities.
The simple version
How a government budget is organized
- Funds are separate bank accounts. Money raised for one purpose, like water bills or a sales tax, goes into its own fund and can only be spent on that purpose.
- The General Fund is the everyday account. Police, parks, roads and city hall are paid from it, mostly with property tax.
- Totals count some money twice. When one fund pays another (a transfer), both show it, so totals aren't a perfect measure of size. The notes below say what each total includes.
Cost per resident, by service
FY2026 General Fund budget ÷ residentsEvery service, every government
▲ more than 25% above the city median · ▼ more than 25% below. Download: CSV · JSON · all open data
How the services are grouped, and what to watch for
- Departments are grouped by name. Each government names its departments differently, so they're sorted into common services. Hover a bar or read the line under each name to see exactly which departments were added together.
- Only the General Fund is counted. Some cities pay for a service partly from other funds (a roads fund, a fire assessment, the CRA), so their General Fund figure can understate the full cost.
- Left out of every service: transfers to other funds, reserves, debt payments and hurricane-recovery (FEMA and debris) lines. "Everyday General Fund" is the General Fund without those.
- Contract services count too. Callaway and Mexico Beach pay the Sheriff for policing; that contract is their police cost.
- Visitors raise the numbers. Panama City Beach and Mexico Beach serve far more people than live there, so their per-resident costs run high.
- Bay County is shown for context only. Its figures are spread over every county resident, though much of the Sheriff's patrol serves unincorporated areas. The school district isn't compared here.
- Residents are the University of Florida's April 2025 state estimates.
Where the money is budgeted, by fund
General Fund spending, by department
Where the money comes from
About this budget
About all the budgets
- FY2026 means Oct 1, 2025 - Sep 30, 2026 for the county and cities; for the school district it means school year 2025-26 (July 1, 2025 - June 30, 2026).
- Totals are gross appropriations including interfund transfers and, where the source includes them, reserves or fund balances. Compare governments with care.
- Each government's notes record the reconciliation result. Unless a note says otherwise, fund amounts sum exactly to 'total' and General Fund departments sum exactly to the General Fund amount.
- Values come from scanned documents (Callaway, Springfield, Parker) read by OCR, or newspaper-ad images (Bay District Schools, Mexico Beach) read manually. Each was cross-checked by confirming the line items sum to the printed totals.
- The 'type' on each fund is the researcher's classification (general, special revenue, CRA, debt service, capital, enterprise, internal service).
- Department and fund names are shortened from the budget documents. Scanned budgets (Callaway, Springfield, Parker) were read by OCR; each list was checked against the document's printed total.