What is the city budget, and where does the money come from?
The City of San Diego plans to spend about $6.5 billion in FY2027 (July 2026 to June 2027). Most of that money is walled off by law into separate pots, and each pot can pay only for what its own rules allow: water bills pay for the water system, for example. Only one pot, the General Fund (about $2.3 billion), is general-purpose money that the City Council can spend on any city service.
Tap a pot, then any box marked ⊕ to open it.
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Where the money comes from, what rule governs it, and what it pays for.
Tap a ribbon to see the rule that governs that money and where the number comes from. General Fund amounts are FY2027. Most other amounts are from the FY2026 budget or the FY2025 capital plan, the latest detail published, and each ribbon names its source. Striped ribbons are borrowed money (bonds), which can pay only for capital projects.
Why doesn't a wealthy city have more money?
Of each dollar of basic property tax paid in San Diego County, cities get about 18¢ on average, so high home values don't mean a big check for City Hall; schools and the county get most of the rest. Of the 7.75% sales tax, the city keeps just 1 cent of every dollar spent (1% of the price), and its General Fund gets 5.5 of the 10.5 cents of base hotel tax, with most of the rest set aside for promoting tourism. Meanwhile, the city's costs have been growing faster than its income.
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The gap: how big is it, and how was it closed?
Before this year's budget decisions, the Mayor and the Council's Independent Budget Analyst (IBA) both put the FY2027 gap in the city's main account for everyday services (the General Fund) at $118M. The budget closed it, as the law requires, with cuts, new revenue and other measures, and by again delaying most of the deposit into the rainy-day reserve that the city's own policy calls for (the reserve contribution). What is left comes back next year (a structural deficit), and its size depends on what is counted, so this section gives each size and says what it counts.
What would closing it cost you?
The calculator below splits the gap per resident and per household, and turns it into a sales tax and a monthly fee. Before the cuts it shows one number. After them it shows two: the city's, and one that also counts the skipped reserve deposit.
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How much of the budget can be cut
What piles up: reserves, infrastructure, pension
When money runs short, some costs aren’t dropped, only put off, and they pile up. Here are three: the city’s rainy-day savings are below its own target, the list of building and repair projects without money keeps growing, and the pension fund holds less than it has promised.
The rainy-day reserve
At the end of FY2026 (June 30, 2026), the city’s rainy-day savings (its General Fund reserves) held $202.4M, by the city’s year-end count, which is not yet audited. Its policy called for $262.9M that year, by the IBA’s calculation.
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Infrastructure
Over the five years FY2027–FY2031, the city’s building and repair needs run $7.82B beyond the money it expects to have: $12.82B of needs against $5.01B of funding, in its five-year plan for capital projects (the CIP Outlook). That is about $1.3B more than a year earlier.
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The pension
The city’s pension fund holds about 76 cents for every dollar of retirement benefits its workers have earned so far: it is 76.1% funded, at the June 30, 2025 valuation.
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How long has this been going on?
The sections above look at one budget year. This chart looks back to FY2012. In many of those years, the city's regular yearly costs were bigger than its regular yearly income (a structural deficit), and the difference was covered with money that will not come back, such as federal COVID relief, savings, and skipped deposits into the city's reserve fund (one-time resources). Through FY2021, the bars count the one-time money that the Council's independent budget analyst (the IBA) found in each proposed budget. From FY2022 they show the net gap in adopted budgets, which peaked in FY2025 at about $181M, or $203.8M counting the skipped reserve deposit (the faint top segment of each bar). Years marked n/r were not reported, not zero.
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The bars are not all measured the same way. Through FY2021, each bar counts all the one-time money in that year's proposed budget. From FY2022, each bar is what was left after subtracting one-time spending, in the adopted budget. The FY2027 bar comes from the IBA's review of the proposed budget.
The faint segment on top of a bar is the deposit into the city's reserve fund that the budget skipped. The IBA's table shows each year's gap both with and without it; the solid part is the version without it, which measures every year the same way. In FY2012 the IBA's count already included skipped reserve contributions, so that bar is split rather than raised.
This chart shows what filled the gap. One-time money is stacked above the line. Money the city spent only once (one-time spending) is drawn below it, because it offsets the total. Years with an itemized list show each source as its own slice.
What the IBA said about each year:
Check a claim
You will hear many explanations for why the city is short of money. Here are five common ones. Tap one to see what the city's budget documents and the Council's independent budget analyst (the IBA) show about it, and what those numbers leave out.
Sources
Every document this page draws on, listed once. The page numbers are the pages cited in the footnotes above.