Where Dallas’s $5.2 billion goes

The City of Dallas adopted its FY 2025-26 budget on September 17, 2025. It is a 798-page document. Here it is in five steps.

Every number on this page is transcribed from the city’s own published budget documents and cited by page at the bottom. Where the city’s numbers don’t agree with each other, that is explained rather than tidied away.

Step 1

The whole budget

$5,202,637,237

For the year running October 1, 2025 through September 30, 2026.

Per resident ~$4,000 about 1.3M residents

Per household ~$9,100 572,194 households

City employees 15,589 funded positions

Change vs. last year +4.6% from $4.97B in FY 2024-25

That is the number in the headline. On its own it is close to useless, because most of it was never available to spend on anything else.

Step 2

Most of it is already committed

A city budget is not one pot of money. It is a stack of separate pots, most of which are legally restricted to a single purpose. Splitting the $5.2 billion by pot is the first thing that makes it comprehensible:

General Fund$1.96B · 37.7%
Enterprise funds$1.53B · 29.4%
Capital$952.7M · 18.3%
Debt service$491.0M · 9.4%
Other operating$265.7M · 5.1%

Enterprise funds are the parts of the city that charge you directly for a service and spend what they collect: water and sewer ($880.9M), Love Field ($208.7M), sanitation ($165.5M), the convention center ($131.5M), stormwater drainage ($90.6M), development permitting ($52.5M), and the municipal radio station ($0.5M). Each is restricted to its own operations, debt, and capital work. Your water bill funds the water system, not street repair — with one defined exception: the water utility pays the General Fund a “street rental” charge for use of the city’s rights-of-way, equivalent to the franchise fee other utilities pay. That transfer lands in the franchise fee line in Step 4.

Debt service pays principal and interest on bonds voters already approved. Capital is construction, driven largely by the 2006, 2012, 2017, and 2024 bond programs. Other operating is grants and similarly restricted money.

That leaves the General Fund — $1.96 billion, 37.7% of the total. This is the discretionary money: property and sales tax revenue that the City Council can actually argue about. When you read about a fight over the Dallas budget, it is almost always a fight about this number.

Step 3

The General Fund, by department

Thirty-seven departments and offices divide the $1.96 billion. Two of them take most of it.

Dallas Police: $758.4M
Dallas Fire-Rescue: $453.4M
Transportation & Public Works: $157.2M
Non-Departmental: $130.4M
Park & Recreation: $117.3M
Library: $43.5M
Code Compliance: $43.0M
Municipal Court & Detention: $42.9M
Facilities & Real Estate: $36.1M
City Attorney: $23.1M
Housing & Community Empowerment: $22.2M
Dallas Animal Services: $21.8M
The other 25 departments, combined: $113.9M

Show all 37 departments

General Fund appropriations, FY 2025-26. Sums exactly to $1,963,072,642.
Department	FY 2025-26
Dallas Police Department	758,373,419
Dallas Fire-Rescue	453,418,515
Transportation & Public Works	157,176,749
Non-Departmental	130,419,406
Park & Recreation	117,311,098
Library	43,459,765
Code Compliance	42,971,909
Municipal Court & Detention Services	42,858,584
Facilities & Real Estate Management	36,082,537
City Attorney's Office	23,056,648
Office of Housing & Community Empowerment	22,248,347
Dallas Animal Services	21,835,915
Office of Arts & Culture	16,233,646
City Controller's Office	9,764,529
Communications & Customer Experience / 311	9,228,550
Office of Emergency Management & Crisis Response	8,959,392
Human Resources	8,842,468
Mayor & City Council	7,840,173
Judiciary	6,639,908
Planning & Development	6,617,691
Office of Environmental Quality & Sustainability	5,592,298
Data Analytics & Business Intelligence	5,572,379
Budget & Management Services	4,543,953
City Secretary's Office	3,899,501
Office of Economic Development	3,789,105
Procurement Services	3,560,641
City Auditor's Office	3,449,793
City Manager's Office	3,095,190
Civil Service	2,978,535
Office of the Inspector General	1,585,222
Office of Government Affairs	994,426
Office of Community Police Oversight	672,350
City Marshal's Office	0
Housing & Community Development	0
Office of Community Care & Empowerment	0
Office of Homeless Solutions	0
Office of Equity & Inclusion	0
General Fund total	1,963,072,642

The five departments at zero were merged, not cut. The City Marshal’s Office moved into Municipal Court & Detention Services, which is why that line jumped from $11.7M to $42.9M. Housing & Community Development, Community Care & Empowerment, Homeless Solutions, and Equity & Inclusion were consolidated into the new Office of Housing & Community Empowerment. Comparing any single department against last year without accounting for this will mislead you.

Police and fire together are $1.21 billion — 61.7% of the General Fund. Add the courts, the judiciary, and emergency management and public safety reaches 64.7%.

The remaining third covers streets, parks, libraries, code enforcement, animal services, permitting, the arts, and every city building. Park & Recreation ($117.3M) runs on about a quarter of what Fire-Rescue does. The 25 smallest departments combined ($113.9M) come to less than Park & Recreation alone.

Step 4

Where the General Fund comes from

Two taxes supply 81.6% of it. Everything else is rounding by comparison.

Property tax: $1.13B
Sales tax: $474.3M
Franchise fees & other: $131.0M
Charges for service: $114.5M
Interest: $28.0M
Operating transfers in: $25.5M
Intergovernmental: $23.1M
Fines & forfeitures: $19.4M
Licenses & permits: $15.1M
Miscellaneous: $4.8M

Property tax is 57.4% and sales tax 24.2%. Sales tax is the volatile one: the city forecasts it against inflation, unemployment, and economic growth, where property tax rests on a valuation base that moves slowly.

Fines and forfeitures come to 1.0% of the General Fund — $19.4M against a $1.96 billion budget.

Step 5

What it looks like on your tax bill

The city’s property tax rate for FY 2025-26 is 69.88¢ per $100 of assessed value, cut from 70.47¢ — the tenth consecutive annual reduction. Of that rate, 50.75¢ funds General Fund operations and 19.13¢ pays debt service.

On a home at the Dallas median market value of $382,010, with the standard 20% homestead exemption:

City property tax, FY 2025-26 $2,135.59 down $15.45 from last year

Same home, over-65 or disabled $912.69 down $157.32; exemption rose to $175,000

But the city is only part of what a Dallas property owner pays. The whole property tax bill divides five ways:

Dallas ISD44.5%
City of Dallas31.3%
Dallas County9.9%
Parkland Hospital9.5%
Dallas College4.7%

Under a third of a Dallas property tax bill goes to the City of Dallas at all. The largest share funds the school district, which the City Council does not control and cannot budget.

Where the city’s own numbers disagree

You will find larger totals than $5.20 billion in the city’s own documents. Three specific things are being counted differently, and all of them are legitimate:

Internal Service Funds — $300.2M — are excluded. These are internal chargebacks: fleet, IT, risk management, employee benefits. Departments pay them out of budgets already counted above, so adding them would count the same dollar twice. One $729,332 line, Transportation Regulation, is inside the $5.20B anyway because the summary table breaks it out separately.
The Employee Retirement Fund — about $306.8M — is accounted separately.
So the appropriation ordinance the Council actually adopted totals about $5.51 billion. Both figures are correct. They count different things, and neither document says so plainly.

Two smaller cautions. Non-Departmental, at $130.4M, is the fourth-largest General Fund line and is not broken out at this level — it holds contracts, intergovernmental agreements, and contingency. And the per-resident figures in Step 1 are approximate: the budget book gives population only as “more than 1.3 million,” so anything derived from it is rounded on purpose.

Sources

Two documents, both published by the City of Dallas.

FY 2025-26 Adopted Annual Operating and Capital Budget (PDF, 798 pp.) — General Fund revenue, p. 67. Tax rate and homestead bills, p. 24 and the Revenue and Debt Service sections. Population, pp. 58–59.
FY 2025-26 Budget Overview (PDF, 52 pp.) — totals, p. 3. Public safety share, p. 9. Departments, pp. 47–48. Positions, pp. 49–51.