What is LA Receipts?
LA Receipts turns the City of Los Angeles's public financial data into something the public can actually read. Live numbers, pulled from city data portals, with the methodology in plain view.
What this is
A civic transparency tool built to make City of LA financial data easier to explore and understand. Not a watchdog report. Not an opinion piece. A live, queryable interface to the city's own numbers.
The site has two layers. Most of it is live: queried from data.lacity.org and controllerdata.lacity.org through the Socrata API. The rest is curated: figures the City publishes only in documents — budget books, the annual homeless count, audits, labor contracts — entered by hand and labelled with their source where they appear. No private records.
Numbers refresh on a short cache (most data hourly; the near-real-time spending feed every ~15 minutes) through ISR, keeping figures current without overwhelming the source APIs.
Data sources
Every chart and table on this site is built on public data. The live datasets are below, followed by the documents behind the curated figures.
Live datasets
| Topic | Dataset | Portal |
|---|---|---|
| Budget | City Budget and Expenditures; Open Budget Appropriations (historical, through FY2024-25) | controllerdata.lacity.org · data.lacity.org |
| Payroll | City Employee Payroll | controllerdata.lacity.org |
| Spending | Checkbook LA Vendor Payments | controllerdata.lacity.org |
| 311 | MyLA311 Service Requests (legacy and post-2025 systems) | data.lacity.org |
| Crime | LAPD NIBRS Offenses | data.lacity.org |
| Housing | Building Permits (2020+) | data.lacity.org |
| Homelessness | Homelessness Expense Tracker | controllerdata.lacity.org |
| Revenue | Revenue Collections by Fiscal Year | controllerdata.lacity.org |
| Deep dives | Pensions, liabilities, contracts & more | controllerdata.lacity.org |
Curated from official documents
| Topic | Documents |
|---|---|
| The City budget | Adopted Budget (Office of the Controller), CAO Proposed Budget and Supporting Information, White Books, Four-Year Outlook |
| Homelessness | LAHSA Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count and Housing Inventory Count, LAHSA budgets, the Alvarez & Marsal audit, CAO homelessness reports |
| Labor contracts | City memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with employee unions |
| Housing production | U.S. Census Bureau Building Permits Survey, 1980 onward |
| Overtime banks | Historical LAPD overtime-bank balances, several years of which come from Los Angeles Times reporting and are cited as such |
Methodology
Five rules govern how data appears on this site:
- →Live figures are aggregated with SoQL (Socrata Query Language) at the source — we pull summaries, not raw records.
- →Curated figures come from official documents that have no dataset, and each one names its document. When a document is superseded (a proposed budget by the adopted one), the page says which version it shows.
- →Numbers may differ slightly from official reports due to timing, rounding, or dataset version differences.
- →The deep-dive analyses use conservative estimates where noted. The methodology is explained in each section.
- →No AI-generated numbers. Every figure traces to a City dataset, an official document, or cited reporting.
Built with
- ·Next.js 16 with Turbopack
- ·Recharts for data visualization
- ·Socrata Open Data API
- ·Deployed on Vercel
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong or out of date, we want to know, and we will correct it. Every correction is listed, with what the page said and what is right, on the corrections page.
Made with care for the City of Los Angeles.