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Mayor Karen Bass proposed budget that includes 1,600 layoffs.
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Samanta Helou Hernandez
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LAist
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Topline:
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass signed a $14 billion spending plan for the upcoming fiscal year that includes more than 600 layoffs and spending cuts across departments. This budget is made up of your tax money, but you aren’t paying less in taxes — what’s changing is how that money’s being spent and what services you get in return. Try our calculator to see what your personal contribution will look like this year.
How does it work? Input the amount of property tax you pay in a year (we have instructions on how to figure that out), and it’ll break down how much is budgeted to various city departments for the upcoming fiscal year, compared to what was spent this year.
Why it matters: The L.A. city government’s financial crisis is fueled in part by overspending. Better understanding how the city government handled its money — and where your taxes fit into it — is one of the biggest ways residents can start to hold leaders accountable.
Read on … to try the calculator for yourself.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council approved a $14 billion spending plan for the upcoming fiscal year, which starts in July and runs through June 2026. It eliminates hundreds of city jobs and reduces spending across a large swath of city departments, though it shifts some of the cuts Bass originally proposed in April.
L.A. residents foot this bill through a combination of property taxes, sales taxes, utility taxes, permit fees, parking tickets and more. Property taxes are the biggest share of the city’s revenue, making up 20% of the general fund that’s used to pay for most services — homeowners and renters contribute to this, since renters likely help their landlords pay this tax through their rent.
The taxes you pay to the city aren’t going down. What’s changing is how they’re being spent, and what kind of services you’re getting in return.
Try our calculator below to find out how much you’re personally contributing to fund city services this year, and how it compares to how your money was spent last year. It’ll give you an approximation of how your property tax dollars get allocated according to the city’s budget.
How it works
Put the amount of property tax you pay each year into the calculator to see your results. It’s not a complete estimate of how much you pay for city services, since it doesn’t factor in contributions like sales taxes or parking meter fees, but it’s the simplest way to get an idea of what your receipt looks like. Know that your actual total contribution is likely higher than what this calculator shows.
The median property tax bill in L.A. is $5,438 per year, according to the Tax Foundation. When in doubt, use this number in the calculator.
To get a more precise figure, you can look up a property tax bill by address with the following steps:
Find the number on the top right that corresponds with General Tax Levy. This is the portion that goes to city and county general funds. Use this number in our calculator below. If you’re in a large apartment building, this number is going to be pretty big. You can divide it by the number of units in your building to estimate your contribution.
How we put this tool together
LAist relied on the city of L.A.’s adopted budget for fiscal year 2025-2026 (made up of the mayor’s proposal and the City Council’s final changes), which includes the amounts budgeted for the upcoming fiscal year as well as expenditure estimates for the current fiscal year, which runs through June 30.
First, we determined what percentage of the city’s general fund came from property tax dollars, and then what percentage of each department’s budget came from the general fund. We used these same percentage formulas to break down your property tax bill for this calculator.
More on how the city spends its money
Wondering what discussions led to some of these budget decisions?
The $1 billion deficit the city faces this year comes after the devastation of the Palisades Fire, expected cuts in federal funding and soaring payouts for liability claims.
The L.A. Police Department has been a major focal point of the City Council’s budget discussions, as it receives the largest share of city funds but struggles to hire its target number of sworn officers. Bass also faced scrutiny over funding for the L.A. Fire Department after its former chief publicly criticized funding cuts in the wake of the Palisades Fire. Liability payouts have climbed year after year, reaching more than $300 million this year. Meanwhile, departments like the Bureau of Sanitation and Bureau of Street Lighting are proposing raising other fees to fund their services as city finances get tighter.
Here’s more context behind some of these figures along with LAist’s recent reporting on city department budgets.
About 280 civilian LAPD jobs will be eliminated in the new budget.
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Chava Sanchez
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LAist
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Police
The Police Department receives more city funding than any other department. More than 95% of its budget comes from the general fund.
The number of sworn police officers has been falling in recent years. Today there are about 8,700 sworn officers, down from roughly 10,000 before the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the 2025 budget negotiation process, Bass clashed with the City Council over how much funding to allocate for hiring new recruits. Ultimately, the 2025-26 plan allows for hiring an additional 240 new officers, and the City Council agreed to find funding to hire an additional 240. The plan keeps the current number of sworn officers stable when accounting for employee attrition.
About 280 civilian jobs will be eliminated, including specialists who analyze DNA evidence.
Although the number of sworn officers has declined, their pay has gone up. In an effort to boost recruitment, Bass in 2023 supported officer salary hikes worth $1 billion over four years, a deal the L.A. City Council approved. The raises are guaranteed under a contract with the police officers’ union that expires in 2027.
The Fire Department’s budget has been a topic of conversation since the Palisades Fire erupted in January. (The LAFD was not in charge of fighting the Eaton Fire, which burned the unincorporated area of Altadena. That was managed by the L.A. County Fire Department.) This department’s budget comes almost entirely from the general fund, with less than 1% coming from a half-cent sales tax all Californians pay for local public safety agencies.
Before the fires broke out, then-L.A. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley had warned that the department was understaffed and that emergency services were suffering. With just under one firefighter per 1,000 residents, the LAFD is among the smallest fire departments per capita of any major city. Response times have also increased in recent years as the city’s population has grown.
The L.A. City Council approved a labor contract in 2024 that boosted firefighter pay and funded new equipment, but Crowley said that wasn’t enough to address understaffing.
The adopted budget for 2025-26 increases the department’s budget to add 58 new positions and purchase new fire trucks. However, District 11 Councilmember Traci Park, one of three council members who voted against the budget, said it still wasn’t enough to meet the department’s day-to-day needs.
One of L.A.’s biggest costs is its annual contribution to retirement and pension funds for city employees, which come from the general fund. For the fiscal year ending this June, the city paid $1.42 billion — about 17.9% of the general fund — to cover those payments, plus some short-term borrowing costs to cover cash flow gaps. Sworn police and fire employees receive the biggest portion of these pension funds. That funding level remains roughly flat in the upcoming fiscal year’s budget, even accounting for impending job cuts.
In 2024, L.A. city voters passed Measure FF, which raised the overall cost of pensions. It allowed about 460 park rangers, port police and other peace officers the option to move from the civilian pension system to the more generous plan reserved for fire and police officers. An analysis from the city administrative officer said the measure would cost the general fund a $23 million one-time payment and about $1 million annually.
When the stock market performs poorly, the city has to contribute more of your tax money to pension funds to make sure pension recipients get what they’re owed. That’s one of many ways the national economic outlook will have a big impact on L.A.’s finances in the years to come.
The dollar amount shown in this calculator represents only a few of the city’s services for unhoused people that aren’t part of other departments’ costs, including Inside Safe, Bass’ initiative to move thousands of unhoused Angelenos to temporary hotels and motels while they await permanent housing, and CIRCLE, a crisis response program that sends mental health workers to respond to nonviolent calls involving unhoused people.
This figure for the 2025-26 fiscal year reflects about $41 million of projected spending on homelessness out of about $350 million budgeted for homeless services from city funds.
The homelessness spending not reflected here also includes city department funds for homelessness-specific services — for example, job support programs for unhoused people through the Economic and Workforce Development Department’s budget, or park encampment cleanup resources through the Recreation and Parks Department’s budget.
The city budgeted another $602 million in homelessness spending this upcoming year to come from state and federal grants as well as taxes or bonds that L.A. city voters passed. (That’s Measure ULA, which sets aside 4% of L.A. city property sales of more than $5 million and allocates them to homeless services, and Proposition HHH, which authorized the city to borrow $1.2 billion to build 10,000 units of housing over a decade.)
The city also contributes money to the joint city-county agency Los Angeles Housing Services Authority, or LAHSA, for its services including the annual Homeless Count, street outreach and case managers for placing unhoused people into available housing. L.A. County lawmakers recently voted to withdraw its funding for LAHSA and create a new county-run agency. L.A. City Council members are exploring the possibility of pulling funding for LAHSA as well. This year’s signed budget for the coming fiscal year slightly increases spending on homelessness by 0.2%.
This year, the city of L.A. is expected to pay more than $300 million to settle claims and lawsuits against the city for wrongdoing. It’s more than triple the amount the city budgeted for liability claims.
That budget remained at $87 million for the past five years despite payouts regularly amounting to double or triple that amount. The budget for the upcoming fiscal year ends that trend, raising the budget to $187 million — more than double that of the previous year, but still not near the $300 million expected to be spent this year.
Some of the most expensive settlements include claims over housing discrimination, police use of force and injuries caused by decaying city infrastructure.
L.A. residents will see their trash fees rise in coming years.
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Robyn Beck
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AFP via Getty Images
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Sanitation
Only about 13% of the Bureau of Sanitation’s funding comes from the general fund in the upcoming budget. A large portion of the rest comes from fees that residents pay for trash, recycling, water usage and other services.
The department has been facing staffing shortages and budget gaps, which is why earlier this year it asked the L.A. City Council to raise trash collection fees. The rate increase was approved, and customers will see trash rates rise through 2029.
If the figure shown in this calculator seems small, that’s because it’s not the full amount we actually pay for street lighting services.
Most of this department’s budget comes from a property tax that’s specifically for street lighting. If you pull up your property tax bill (see instructions near the top of this story), you’ll see a section called “Direct Assessments.” Underneath that is a line for “City Lt Maint” — that’s most of what you’re contributing to this department’s services.
This fee hasn’t increased since the late 1990s. That has put stress on the department’s budget, which is also seeing rising costs due to copper wire thefts and frequent outages.
Last year’s budget eliminated about 17% of positions from the Bureau of Street Lighting, which were vacant at the time. The adopted budget for 2025-26 cuts it by another 7%.
