Budget Spending per Resident — All 169 Connecticut Towns

Each town's adopted budget divided by its population: education, municipal operations, and the two combined.

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Picking a town highlights it in every chart and table on this page, and the highlight follows you to the other ranking pages. Clear the box to remove it.

Read this before ranking towns: spending is not the same as taxes. Part of every budget is paid by state aid, fees and other revenue, so a town can spend more per resident while taxing less — the state-aid page shows that side. Population is also not the same as service load: a town full of school-age children needs more education spending per resident than one full of retirees at the same spending per student (the per-student page uses the student denominator). And these are adopted budgets — the plan each town adopted, not the audited result.
Lowest total budget per resident
Statewide median
Highest total budget per resident

Total adopted budget per resident

Each town's whole adopted budget for — education plus everything else — divided by its population. Sorted lowest to highest; rank 1 is the lowest figure, which describes the amount, not the town.

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Source: CT OPM adopted municipal budgets (pcg4-s5rc) via ct_adopted_budgets.json; population from the US Census ACS 5-year estimates via ct_town_income.json.

Education spending per resident

The education line of each adopted budget, per resident. For towns in a regional school district this is the town's payment to that district. Towns with more school-age residents sit higher here without spending more per student.

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Source: same files as above; education_expenditures field. The per-student version of this ranking is on the education spending page.

Municipal (non-education) spending per resident

Everything in the adopted budget that is not the education line — public safety, public works, general government, debt service, contingency — per resident.

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Source: same files; computed as total_expenditures − education_expenditures. Debt service stays in this figure, so a town mid-way through paying for a school project ranks higher here.

The full table

All 169 towns, ranked by total budget per resident, with both components.

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How this ranking is made

Each figure is the town's adopted general-fund budget for as filed with OPM, divided by the town's population from the most recent ACS 5-year release. The adopted budget is the appropriated general fund — a narrower measure than the audited all-funds figure OPM publishes two years later, and the two must not be mixed in one series.

  • Population is a 5-year pooled estimate with a margin of error; small differences between small towns are not meaningful.
  • Education for regional-district towns is the town's assessment payment to the district, which folds the district's own state aid out differently than a local district's budget does.
  • A handful of towns run services through separate districts (fire districts and similar) whose budgets are not in the town budget at all; those towns look lower here than what their residents actually pay in total.

More rankings: tax rates · taxes vs. income · education spending per student