Sources, methodology, and caveats

Data sources

• City of Portsmouth Finance Department — adopted budget memos, mid-year amendments, and the FY27 Proposed Budget book.
• Annual Comprehensive Financial Reports (ACFR) and Popular Annual Financial Reports (PAFR) — FY07 through the most recent published year.
• US Census Bureau Population Estimates Program (PEP) — annual estimates for the City of Portsmouth, with FY25–FY27 extrapolated from the trend.

Methodology

Operating vs Non-Operating. Operating includes the School, General Government, Police, Fire departments, plus the General Fund transfers (Indoor Pool, Prescott Park, Community Campus) and the Collective Bargaining contingency. Non-Operating includes debt service, Rockingham County tax, capital outlay, rolling stock, IT equipment replacement, property and liability insurance, contingency, landfill closure, and overlay interest.

Fiscal-year mapping. Portsmouth FY runs July 1 to June 30. FY27 means July 2026 to June 2027.

FY08 OCR. The original FY08 source document was scanned. Some line-item figures were recovered via OCR and reconciled against the next year's adopted-vs-prior comparison table.

Reconciliation. Every operating-department file sums exactly to its published department total; revenues, operating, and non-operating each sum to FY27 totals to the dollar.

Caveats

FY27 is proposed, not adopted. The Council typically adopts the budget in June. Numbers can change.

FY26 figures are amended. We use the $150,294,940 amended total (per the FY27 release) rather than the $149,894,940 originally adopted, for consistency with the City's published comparisons.

Population for FY25–FY27 is extrapolated from the Census PEP trend and is flagged as estimated everywhere it appears.

Implied assessed value in the tax-rate explainer is derived from levy ÷ rate × 1,000. The actual figure is set by the NH Department of Revenue Administration in the fall and may differ.

Independent project

This site is an independent civic-transparency project. It is not operated by, affiliated with, or endorsed by the City of Portsmouth, NH. To contact the City directly, visit cityofportsmouth.com .