Connecticut town budgets, traced to the primary sources — one town at a time.
A town budget is public, but it arrives as a few hundred pages of line items. This site takes what a Connecticut town publishes — its adopted budget books, its audited filings with the state, its enrollment and grand list — and puts the figures on charts a resident can read in a few minutes.
It is a civic data resource, not advocacy. Every number traces to a primary source, and where a finding changes under a different denominator, deflator or set of comparison towns, that alternative is shown next to it rather than left out.
One town whose own adopted budget books have been transcribed and checked by eye, page against page, and are charted alongside the statewide datasets.
Southeastern Connecticut Planning Region · DRG D (CT SDE, assigned 2006) · population 15,504 (CT DPH, July 2023)
Its adopted budgets against inflation, population, neighboring towns and demographic peers — plus enrollment and cost, reserves and debt, the health insurance fund, a property-tax calculator, and a searchable library of town and Board of Education documents.
Open Colchester →
All 169 Connecticut towns, shaded by what this site holds for each one. The 169 with pages are links — 1 studied in depth, from its own adopted budget books, and 168 on the statewide tier, the 41-chart page set built only from datasets the state publishes for every Connecticut town. The other 0 are drawn but have no page yet.
Town boundaries: US Census Bureau cb_2023_09_cousub_500k (2023 vintage), generalized to 1:500,000. In Connecticut a Census county subdivision is a town.
169 towns across 9 planning regions. 168 of them carry the statewide tier: 41 charts across 6 pages, built only from datasets the state and federal government publish for every Connecticut town — CT OPM audited actuals and the state’s summary of each town’s adopted budget, CT SDE enrollment, US Census income, and the grand list and mill rate records.
Those towns’ own budget books have not been transcribed. The state’s adopted-budget summary reports education as one figure and everything else as another, so no department- or line-item figure from a town’s own budget document appears on its pages. For 21 of them the books have been downloaded but not yet read, and no figure from them is used anywhere on this site. The Data Coverage page lists what has and has not been collected, dataset by dataset. Populations below are CT DPH July 1 estimates for 2023, the latest year the state’s uniform table carries for every town; a town’s own pages may cite a later DPH count for a later year.
Showing all 169 towns
No town matches that. Only towns already published are listed here.
Each town page cites its sources inline, and every chart names the dataset behind it. Across the site the primary sources are:
Audited actuals and adopted budgets are different measures and are never plotted on one axis; where both are relevant, both are shown and labelled.
Connecticut is the Nutmeg State, and the nickname carries a story: peddlers were said to have sold carved wooden nutmegs to buyers who did not check. Whether it ever happened is disputed. Either way it is a fair instruction for a site like this one: check the nutmeg. Every figure here names its source so you can.