City money since 1888, one timeline
Total city finances from 1888 to 2025. The modern years come from the adopted budget; the older ones are transcribed verbatim from scanned municipal reports at the Internet Archive, each linked to its page.
Today's dollars (2025), divided by that year's San Francisco population — the most honest single comparison across 140 years.
view original ↗Total amount of expenditures
“Total Amount of Expenditures '. '. '"' $3,666,879 62”verbatim from the scan · scan leaf 643 · view original, scan leaf 643 ↗
Source: San Francisco serial financial report, Internet Archive (sanfranciscomuni38sanfrich). Population for 1888: 285,989 — linearly interpolated between the 1880 and 1890 decennial censuses.
Real dollars are adjusted with the CPI-U to 2025 (pre-1913: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis historical index, spliced to the BLS CPI-U at 1913); comparisons across such spans mix price levels with a growing city and an expanding scope of government.
Inflation: US CPI-U (All Urban Consumers, U.S. city average, All items) (1982-84=100) — BLS · pre-1913 index. Population: City and County of San Francisco, U.S. decennial Census population — U.S. Census. Live budget: Budget.
Between FY2010 and FY2025, adopted city spending rose from $6.7B to $15.9B. The largest single increase was in Public Works, Transportation & Commerce (+$3.6B, to $5.9B), and the health and human-services areas grew fastest — Human Welfare & Neighborhood Development more than 3× its FY2010 level (+$1.9B). Personnel — salaries and mandatory fringe benefits — went from $3.5B to $7.0B, roughly 2.0× over the span.
Staff pay is the biggest single force: salaries and mandatory fringe benefits went from $3.5B to $7.0B — about 2.0× — over the same span.
Computed from the SF adopted-budget marts. Compared on service areas and personnel only — the FY2018 PeopleSoft chart-of-accounts change relabels finer spending types, so those are not comparable before and after and are left out here.
What the city funded in the archival era, transcribed verbatim from the scanned reports (page-level deep links). 1888 lines are illustrative ledger entries, not a ranking; 1913 are department totals as printed. Fuller per-era breakdowns are a work in progress.
- Street Department“Street Department expenses $292,713 21” · scan leaf 642 ↗$292,713
- Lighting the streets“Street Light expenses 254,438 21” · scan leaf 642 ↗$254,438
- School Department“Total 1,868,950.05 1,912,047.89” · scan leaf 18 ↗$1.9M
- Streets and Sewers“Total 1,280,167.65 1,505,910.50” · scan leaf 19 ↗$1.5M
Archive figures are the single citywide headline total as printed in a scanned San Francisco serial financial report on the Internet Archive, transcribed verbatim with its page-level deep link. The historical serials report different top-lines across eras (total receipts, total expenditures, total budget) — recorded per point in `measure` — so the archive tier is shown 'as reported in the scan' and never joined to the live line.
The figure as printed is the untouched anchor; “today’s dollars” and “per resident” are labelled derived transforms you toggle above — they never replace or hide the printed number. Live budget totals come from the SF adopted budget.