The City’s budget
$1.36B in 2015 · $2.55B in 2025
Click a year to see its amount.
Expenses and revenue in 2018
The small curve follows each line up to 2018.
Click a line to see it year by year, beside the others.
Expenses$1.59B
Police protection$325M20%Utilities$301M19%Engineering$212M13%Parks and recreation$206M13%General government$176M11%Fire protection$136M9%Arts, culture and community services$117M7%Planning and development$59.8M4%Library$55.1M3%Revenue$1.98B
Property taxes, penalties and interest$833M42%Utility fees$277M14%Developer contributions$257M13%Program fees$124M6%Cost recoveries and donations$107M5%Parking$98.1M5%License and development fees$94.8M5%Government transfers$67.8M3%Rental, lease and other$66.8M3%Investment income$37.7M2%Bylaw fines$22.4M1%Gain (loss) on sale of tangible capital assets−$7.1M—Who pays the property tax, 2018
Share of property-tax revenue by property class, as the City prints it.
Understand
Actuals, not the adopted budget
Every figure on this page is an actual: what the City spent and took in over a year, as its Statement of Financial Information reports it once the year is closed. The operating budget Council adopts before the year starts is published only in the City’s budget book, a PDF, and is not loaded here, so this page does not set what was planned against what was spent.
What does this number measure?
The City’s consolidated expenses, in dollars of each year, not adjusted for inflation. A building, a road or equipment bought during the year is not counted when it is bought: its cost is spread over its life, as amortization. The amount per resident divides the year’s expenses by the population the City prints on its own debt table (source: BC Stats).
The same expenses are printed by kind of cost from 2018 only; for earlier years the page reads them by service alone.
Revenue before 2017: other lines
The City’s reports print revenue under different lines before 2017: the classification changed. The total is printed for every year from 2015; the lines under it are not always the same. On this page the small curves of revenue stay on one side of the change.
Printed only before 2017: Cost recoveries, grants and donations · Revenue sharing · Gain on sale of Southeast False Creek assets.
Printed only from 2017: Government transfers · Cost recoveries and donations.
Capital additions and amortization
In 2018 the City added $346M to its buildings, infrastructure, land and equipment. That money is not in the expenses above: an asset is expensed over its life, as amortization, $188M in 2018.
Where do these figures come from?
Each figure is a line of the five-year statistical review in the City’s Statement of Financial Information, which the City marks unaudited. Each year is read from the newest report that prints it; later reports restate earlier years. vancouver.ca refuses scripted requests, so each document is read, and linked, from its Internet Archive copy.
2018: Statement of Financial Information 2022, p. 50 ↗ · CSV 2018 ↗ · budget.json ↗ · Sources and method →
Reports read: 2019 · 2020 · 2021 · 2022 · 2023 · 2024 · 2025
Source: City of Vancouver, Statements of Financial Information 2019–2025, five-year statistical reviews (each year from the newest report printing it). Consolidated actuals.