State government spending (ASFIN)
Total state government expenditure for the nation and every state, from the Census Bureau's survey of state government finances.
Publisher
- Organization
- U.S. Census Bureau
- Publisher’s dataset
- Annual Survey of State Government Finances
- File or API used
- https://api.census.gov/data/timeseries/govsstatefin
- Retrieval script
scripts/fetch-census-asfin.py- Methodology
- https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/state/technical-documentation/methodology.html
Coverage
- Geography
- Nation and every state (the District of Columbia has no state-government row in this survey; see caveats)
- Time coverage
- FY2012-FY2024
- Update frequency
- Annual
- Published
- not stated
- Retrieved
- September 9, 2026
- License of the records
- Public domain. U.S. federal government work.
- Rows
- 663 observations, 2012-2024
Measures
| Measure | What it measures | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| State government expenditure (total) | Total state government expenditure (General Expenditure plus Utility Expenditure plus Liquor Store Expenditure; excludes Insurance Trust Expenditure), for the state fiscal year. | usd thousands |
Caveats
- This total differs from this site's transparent-idaho-acfr dataset in fund basis and scope; both figures are kept, see disagreements.
- Periods are labeled by the Census Bureau's reference year, not each state's own fiscal year end.
- Coverage is FY2012-FY2024; earlier years use a different item-code layout and are not included.
- District of Columbia is excluded: the Census Bureau does not treat it as a state government for this survey.
Where sources disagree
- State government expenditure (total), Idaho, FY2024: transparent-idaho publishes 13,331,872. The Census Bureau's Annual Survey of State Government Finances gives Idaho total expenditure of 14,699,129 thousand dollars for FY2024, versus the ACFR's governmental-funds spending of 13,331,872 thousand dollars (dataset transparent-idaho-acfr, government.spending_total). The survey's total covers general, utility and liquor store expenditure on the Census classification and excludes insurance trust spending; the ACFR figure is governmental funds only on the state's own fund basis. Both are kept.
How to cite
Understand Idaho, “Annual Survey of State Government Finances”, compiled from U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Survey of State Government Finances. Retrieved September 9, 2026. https://understandidaho.com/data/census-asfin/.
Cite U.S. Census Bureau directly for the figures themselves.
This page was last updated .