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Board Budgets

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Governance July 2026

Every Board Runs on About $380,000. That Covers Staff, Rent, and Everything Else.

All 59 community board budgets in the FY2027 adopted budget, ranked smallest to largest. The median board gets $383,130 to represent a district of 50,000 to more than 200,000 people, roughly $2.63 per resident per year. The spread from the best funded board (Manhattan CB 10, $514,822) to the least (Brooklyn CB 15, $280,971) is driven largely by office rent, not by district need.

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FY2027 adopted budget, all 59 community boards
Each board is its own agency in the City's expense budget. Bars show the full adopted appropriation: staff salaries plus other-than-personal-services (rent, supplies, technology).
Manhattan
Brooklyn
Queens
Bronx
Staten Island
Created by Tal Roded · NYCuriosity · Source: NYC Open Data, Expense Budget (FY2027 adopted)

The whole system costs $22.3 million. All 59 boards combined amount to 0.019% of the City's $117.8 billion FY2027 budget. For that sum the Charter asks the boards to review every land use application in the city, negotiate every liquor license, submit budget priorities, and field constituent complaints year-round.

Rent explains most of the spread. Boards do not set their own funding, and the variation between boards largely reflects differences in office rent and long-tenured staff salaries rather than any assessment of district need, a pattern Daniel Golliher documented at Maximum New York. The 2021 Future of Community Boards Working Group reported a typical board had $231,100 for its entire staff and that boards had seen no significant baseline increase since 2014.

Method: Author's analysis of the NYC Open Data Expense Budget dataset, FY2027 adopted publication (June 30, 2026). Each board's figure is the sum of adopted appropriations across all of its budget codes; each community board is a separate budget agency.

Context sources: Future of Community Boards Working Group Final Report (December 2021); Daniel Golliher, "NYC's Community Board Budgets," Maximum New York (March 2025). Per-resident figure divides the $22.27M citywide total by the 2020 Census population of 8,478,072.