What this is
This website is for one purpose: to give Vermont citizens the information they need to make personal decisions in life. It's for Vermont media. It's here for legislators. It's here for podcasters and columnists — for regular people who want to know where their money is going and want to have something to say about it.
The state's budget documents have always been public — buried in budget books and spreadsheets almost nobody can read over coffee. So we rebuilt them the way they should have been published in the first place: one line at a time, in plain English. What each line is. What it spends on — people, operations, or grants. And where the money comes from.
No spin, because there's nobody to spin for. This is a tool for everybody, no matter who you vote for.
Ask your own questions
Take this site's address and drop it into your favorite AI — Grok, ChatGPT, Muse — and ask it anything you want about the Vermont budget. Where does the education money actually go? What do we spend on prisons versus plowing? Ask it your way, with your own follow-ups.
The data is out open source, and so is the mechanism to understand it. Don't take our word for it. Don't take their word for it. Here's the data, here's the tool — run your own analysis. The full dataset is here too: budget.json.
Read this first — the honest math
If you add up every line on this site, you'll get $11,853,777,500. That is not the size of Vermont's budget, and we won't pretend it is.
Some money gets counted more than once as it moves through state government. Medicaid dollars in the Global Commitment fund (about $2.23 billion of the lines below) also surface as federal and state shares elsewhere. Agencies charge each other through internal service funds (about $235 million) and interdepartmental transfers (about $109 million). Counted once, Vermont's FY2026 budget is about $9.1 billion.
Every line on this site shows the amount exactly as enacted and listed in the state's own files. We'd rather show you the double-counting than hide it — that's the whole point of open books.
How to use this
- Browse by area and department, or search for anything — a program, a department, a bill section number.
- Sort the whole budget by name or by size. Biggest first is the fun one.
- Flag any line — Yes, I question this · No, looks fine to me · Review, I want to look closer.
- Check your dashboard to see what you questioned, ranked by dollars. For the first time, at a town hall or a kitchen table, you can point to a specific line in the state budget and ask: why?
Your dashboard
This tally is yours — it's saved only in this browser, on this device, and nobody else sees it. A shared public dashboard, where every Vermonter's questions tally together, is the planned next step. For now, this is your copy of the ledger. Mark it up.
More open books
- FYIVT — The Citizens' Checkbook — every check the State of Vermont writes, searchable. Same church: people should be able to see where their money goes without a finance degree.
- The source — Vermont Dept. of Finance & Management, FY2026 — the state's own budget page, where every number on this site comes from.
- The data (JSON) — this site's full dataset, free for anyone to use, check, or build on.