Local governments tracked
About BenchmarkUSA
Government financial transparency for every community in America.
Mission
BenchmarkUSA makes local government financial data accessible, comparable, and useful. We collect official financial reports from state comptrollers, the US Census Bureau, and other authoritative sources, then organize them so residents, journalists, researchers, and public officials can understand how their local governments raise and spend money.
Transparent government is effective government. When financial data is easy to find and compare, communities can make better decisions, recognize excellence, and hold their institutions accountable.
Nationwide coverage
Who Built This
BenchmarkUSA is built by Ben Unger, a physician and engineer with a lifelong commitment to transparent and effective government at every level.
Ben studied engineering as an undergraduate, then served as a US Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras (1996–1998), where he designed and built gravity-fed and pump-driven water sanitation systems for rural communities. That experience — building public infrastructure from scratch, seeing firsthand how resource decisions shape people's lives — planted the seed for this project.
After returning to the US, Ben went to medical school and became an anesthesiologist. He also served in the US military reserves, receiving an honorable discharge in 2017. He has lived across the country — from Ohio to Massachusetts to Philadelphia to New York — and has seen how differently local governments serve their communities.
Ben started coding in 2013, learning Ruby on Rails through Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial, and has been building and maintaining web applications since. BenchmarkUSA combines his engineering instincts, analytical rigor from medicine, and belief that public data should be public and useful.
Data
All data comes from official federal, state, and local government sources. We never estimate or fabricate numbers. For details on our collection and processing methods, see the Methodology page.
Contact
Questions, corrections, or feedback? Reach out at [email protected]. Data accuracy is our highest priority — if you spot an error, we want to know.