Follow the money

Where will $1.34 billion
of Aurora’s money go?

Aurora’s 2026 Adopted budget appropriates $1.34 billion across all funds. That total adds up what each of the city’s twenty funds may spend, so it counts a transferred dollar in both funds. Aurora also spans three counties, so every figure on these pages says which government it belongs to.

FACT Source: 2026 Adopted budget book · City of Aurora · identified by its own interior statement and page footers, because its cover names no stage

Total budget FACT

$1.34B

$1,343,410,297 in all-funds appropriations, 2026 Adopted. It sums what each fund may spend, so it counts a transferred dollar in both funds. The city’s audited report states the eliminated view, $1,093,962,957 of government-wide expenses for 2025: a different quantity on a different basis, never mixed with this one.

General Fund FACT

$550.5M

$550,497,207 of total uses, 2026 Adopted. The General Fund is the city’s main operating fund, and the book prints it both as sources and as uses.

Capital program FACT

$384.4M

$384,354,334, the 2026 adopted year of the Capital Improvement Program. Carryforward from earlier years is a separate quantity and is not in this figure.

Per Aurora resident CALC

≈ $3,332

$1,343,410,297 ÷ 403,130 residents (Census, 2024). A scale, not a bill: businesses and visitors pay too.

The $100 receipt See where $100 of city spending goes, by fund type Five fund types, from the budget book’s own matrix of its adopted total. Capital projects See the capital projects the city lists for 2026 The city’s own capital money, project by project where the book lists it, and Aurora Water by category, on a page of its own. The Budget See the budget in dollars and per resident The five fund types in dollars and per $100, three totals per resident, and what a household pays at the register. Follow Your Dollar Estimate what your own household paid the state Colorado’s tool, by ZIP code. The arithmetic runs in your browser, and nothing you type leaves the page.

Where $100 goes, by fund type CALC

Our arithmetic over the budget book’s own department-by-fund-type matrix, whose columns sum to the all-funds total exactly. The five shares each round to cents and sum to exactly $100.00 with no forced rounding. The city’s own pie chart prints whole percentages, so it rounds capital projects up to 6%. The exact figure is $5.49 of every $100, which is why this receipt carries cents.

Fund type	Per $100
Enterprise Funds	$41.41
General Fund	$40.98
Special Revenue Funds	$9.44
Capital Projects Funds	$5.49
Internal Service Funds	$2.68
Total	$100.00

The matrix carries a sixth column, Debt Service Funds, and in 2026 it is empty: the city appropriated no spending through a debt-service fund, so it has no row here. Enterprise Funds are the operations that pay their own way, and Aurora Water is most of them.

What this total is and is not

Three things decide what the total above means. Each one is stated here so a reader can check it.

It counts a transferred dollar in both funds. A dollar the General Fund transfers to a capital fund is appropriated in the General Fund, and appropriated again in the fund that spends it. The audited report’s $1,093,962,957 of 2025 government-wide expenses nets that out. It is a different quantity on a different basis, and the two are never mixed in one row.
Aurora Water is inside the total, not a separate district. The Water Fund ($385,641,632) and the Wastewater Fund ($153,139,366) are two of the twenty funds. They are the reason Enterprise Funds is the largest slice above. The department view prints a slightly different figure for Aurora Water’s enterprise spending ($537,869,085), because a small share of the two funds’ spending sits under other departments. The department view and the fund view are different cuts of the same total.
County money flows into city funds, by county. The Open Space Fund is fed by Arapahoe County’s and Adams County’s open-space sales taxes, tracked separately inside the fund. The Transportation Maintenance Fund carries an Adams County transportation sales tax line. City and county budgets are still never summed on this site: each county’s own budget is a separate government’s money.

Capital projects

Aurora’s own capital program for 2026 is $384.4M, the hero’s capital tile. The budget book lists the projects of every fund one by one except Aurora Water, which it publishes by category, and Aurora Water is most of the program. The Projects page shows both, each labeled with how the city lists it. Spending by project is not published, so none is shown.

The project ledger Open the capital ledger Each project with its 2026 Adopted appropriation, Aurora Water’s categories beside them, and an honest blank for spending.

The State of Colorado also spends capital money at sites in Aurora. That is a different government’s money. The Projects page lists it below the city’s own, and it is never added to any figure here. State projects in Aurora

The counties around this city

FACT

This is three counties’ money, not the city’s. Aurora is a home-rule city spanning parts of three counties — Arapahoe, Adams and Douglas — and people arrested in Aurora are held by whichever of those three sheriffs has them. There is no such thing as “Aurora’s county jail budget”: three governments run three jails on three budgets, and this site will not add them together or pick one to stand for the city. Each county below is shown on its own, under its own name, with its own publisher’s wording. None of it is part of the city budget above, and none of it is ever added to one.

County	The county’s own 2026 budget	Its Sheriff’s Office	What it calls its jail line	That division’s 2026 budget
Arapahoe County	$667,459,465	$161,587,229	Detention Services Bureau	$75,389,992
Adams County	$867,186,487	$135,128,397	Corrections	$66,154,689
Douglas County	NOT PUBLISHED	NOT PUBLISHED	no separate jail line	NOT PUBLISHED

Why there are three money columns and not one

A county Sheriff’s whole department is the wrong answer to “what does the jail cost”, and it is always the nearer and larger one — it also pays for patrol, for investigations and for everything else the office does. So the jail line is printed beside the department it sits in, and beside the county it sits in, and the reader is told which is which instead of being left to assume. Every figure here was reconciled against a total the county itself printed before it was published, and each county’s document is named on the methodology page.

What Arapahoe County calls it, and what it covers

Arapahoe County calls it the Detention Services Bureau, and it is more than the jail: by the county’s own description the bureau also secures the courthouses, moves people to and from court, and transports them to and from other jails and prisons. That is why it is printed under the county’s name for it and never as “the jail budget”. Its five sibling divisions sum exactly to the department total beside it, and so, separately, do its eight funds. The three figures on that row are nested inside one another and belong to one government: the jail line ($75,389,992) is one division of the Sheriff’s Office ($161,587,229), which is one department of the county ($667,459,465). They are never added to each other, and never to anything on this page above.

What Adams County calls it, and what it covers

Adams County calls it Corrections — the county’s own word, not ours — and it is the county jail. It is one of eight divisions that sum exactly to the department total beside it. That department is drawn wider here than in the other counties: it also carries the county’s emergency management and its public-safety technology, which is why the department total is printed rather than left implied. The three figures on that row are nested inside one another and belong to one government: the jail line ($66,154,689) is one division of the Sheriff’s Office ($135,128,397), which is one department of the county ($867,186,487). They are never added to each other, and never to anything on this page above.

Douglas County NOT PUBLISHED

Douglas County publishes no jail figure and no figure this site can date. Its Sheriff is budgeted as one department: a Detentions division exists in the county’s staffing tables, at 164 positions, and in no dollar table in the book. The book also contradicts itself about its own stage — its cover and contents say “2026 Adopted Budget” and its interior page footers say “2026 Proposed Budget” — so no figure in it can be published under a stage name either. About one Aurora resident in a hundred lives in this county, and that is not a reason to guess on their behalf.

Where the money comes from

PENDING

Where Aurora’s 2026 money comes from, by source, is printed in the same 2026 Adopted budget book. It has not been read into this site’s data yet, so this section stays blank on purpose rather than estimated. The one city tax a household sees at the register is in the next section.

What a household pays

One city tax reaches an Aurora household directly: the sales tax at the register. The city’s own rate is the same in all three counties, and the total a shopper pays is not, because county and district shares differ. Each line names where it is published. Those other shares are not Aurora’s money, and none is added to a city figure.

FACT City sales and use tax rate: 3.75% of a taxable sale, in all three counties. Aurora is a home-rule city and collects this share itself. Source: City of Aurora, Office of Budget and Financial Planning, 2026 Operating and Capital Improvement Budget (adopted).
FACT Combined rate a shopper pays in the Arapahoe County part: 8.00%. Most of the city’s residents live in this part. Same source as the line above.
FACT Combined rate in the Adams County part: 8.50%. Same source as the line above.
FACT Combined rate in the Douglas County part: 8.75%. There is no single “Aurora sales tax” a shopper pays, so none is printed here. Same source as the line above.
PENDING Aurora’s own property tax levy is not on this page yet. The state’s property tax report prints what is levied county by county, and Aurora’s land lies in three counties, so no county’s row is Aurora’s. The line stays blank rather than borrowed from a county.

What the money buys See what the city’s spending delivers, and what other governments run Vehicle theft from the city’s own police department, and why jails and schools belong to other governments. No causal claim is made.

Why this exists

Government you can actually see.

Aurora Works Better turns the city’s $1.34 billion of 2026 adopted appropriations into plain-English answers. That total sums fund appropriations, so a dollar transferred between funds is counted in both — the audited eliminated basis is published beside it and the two are never mixed. Aurora also spans three counties, so every single-county join breaks, and this page says which county part a figure belongs to.

Facts, not spin

Every figure ties to an official record with its source and confidence grade. We keep appropriated, spent, and delivered clearly separate — and never estimate what we can’t verify.

Plain language

No jargon, no 400-page PDFs. If a resident can’t see where the money goes in under a minute, we haven’t done our job.

Accountability

We publish the open questions the city should answer, and the ones it has not answered yet. When a brief worth reading exists we will put it in your hands — and until it does, this site says so rather than announcing a schedule it has not kept.

CollectOfficial public records — the 2026 Adopted Budget book, resolved by the city’s own link text rather than a download key.

VerifySource every figure, grade its confidence, separate fact from calculation.

PublishPlain-English dashboards anyone can scan in a minute.

AnswerOpen questions put to the city, their answers when they come, and a brief once there is one to write.

Weekly reports

PENDING

No brief has been published for this locale yet. This section is empty because there is nothing to put in it, not because the format is still being designed. There is no publication schedule to announce, and none is claimed below.

Nothing published yet

The first brief has not been written

Rather than show an example of what one might look like, this space stays empty until a real one exists. A sample brief on a page like this is indistinguishable from a real one at a glance, and the whole point of this site is that you never have to guess which you are reading.

The fine print Read what to know before comparing Aurora’s figures One city in three counties, a sales tax that depends on the county, and what these pages do not cover yet.

The corrections log

Oct 6 · Reader input — until today the sign-up on this page was demo only, nothing was collected, and a project page had no Follow or rating. From today the sign-up, Follow and your take on a project are real. What you send goes to a store this project controls: a rating or comment is kept with no name, address or identifier, and no rating and no total is published on this site, while a comment is never published on it; a sign-up or follow keeps your address and what you follow, sends a confirmation link before anything else, and unsubscribes in one click. We do not record IP addresses, and we do not track whether an email was opened. The handling note is in the methodologydisclosed
Sep 30 · The education box named four school districts. Aurora’s land lies in five. The box said four public school districts serve Aurora. We then checked the city block by block against the Census Bureau’s 2020 maps of school districts and cities. A fifth district, Bennett School District 29-J, holds a small edge of the city where very few people live. The box now names all five. No figure changed, because no education figure has ever been published on this page. What changed is the reason given for that blank, which is now complete.corrected
Aug 30 · A blank field changed which refusal it was making. The People incarcerated /100k card said NOT PUBLISHED. It now says NOT ELIGIBLE. No figure changed — the field was blank before and is blank now, and nothing was added, removed or recalculated. What changed is the reason a reader is given for the blank. This site asks readers to learn a small piece of grammar: NOT PUBLISHED means somebody could publish a figure and has not, NOT ELIGIBLE means the measure cannot exist at this level, and PENDING means we have not finished. Those three must mean the same thing on every page or they mean nothing. They did not. This card argued that a county sheriff could publish how many Aurora residents are in custody, and that none does — so, NOT PUBLISHED. The other Colorado city pages said NOT ELIGIBLE for the same measure. The trouble is that the argument is equally true of all of them: a sheriff in Larimer, Jefferson or El Paso County could publish the same count and none does either. So four sibling pages were making two different claims about one measure on the same facts — not because the facts differed, but because two people reasoned differently about them. The card now leads with the reason the others give: Aurora holds nobody in custody, so a city rate has no numerator. The three-county facts stay underneath, because they are still true and still the reason no publisher states one. The earlier reasoning was recorded rather than deleted, so anyone reading the check later finds the argument and who overruled it.clarified

3 corrections since 30 August 2026, the most recent on 6 October 2026. Last checked 6 October 2026. The full log, on a page of its own