Fairfax County publishes a detailed budget every year.
It’s comprehensive.
It’s public.
And for most residents, it’s effectively unreadable.
Not because the information isn’t there — but because it’s hard to translate a county budget into something personal.
So we built a simple tool to answer one straightforward question:
Where do your Fairfax County taxes go in 2026?
Turning a budget page into something usable
The FY2026 Fairfax County budget includes a single page [1] showing how the General Fund is allocated across major categories — schools, public safety, health and welfare, debt service, and more.
That page is the source.
We took that page and converted it into structured data:
- every category
- every published sub-category
- every percentage
- every footnote and exclusion
Nothing added.
Nothing inferred.
The result is a model that preserves the budget exactly as adopted — but makes it usable.
The “Where Do Your 2026 Taxes Go?” app
The app does one thing.
You enter an amount — for example, $10,000 — and it shows how that amount is distributed across the FY2026 Fairfax County General Fund.
You can see:
- how much of that $10,000 supports public schools
- how much goes to public safety
- how much is allocated to health and welfare
- how much covers debt service, central services, transit, and other functions
Every number adds up.
Every category traces back to the official budget.
What changes is not the data — only your ability to see it.
Why we built it
Percentages are useful, but they’re abstract.
Dollar flows are easier to reason about.
When residents can see how their money moves through the budget, questions become clearer:
- scale becomes visible
- tradeoffs become legible
- unclear categories stand out naturally
That’s the point of the tool.
What comes next
This is the first step.
Because the budget is now data — not just a graphic — it can support:
- deeper drill-downs
- clearer explanations of aggregated categories
- year-to-year comparisons
- public questions grounded in shared numbers
The foundation is now in place.
Try it
Enter a number that’s meaningful to you — $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 — and see where it goes in the FY2026 Fairfax County budget.
That’s it.
No interpretation required.
[1] Chart - General Fund Disbursements, accessed January 26, 2026 from https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/budget/fy-2026-adopted-budget-plan-volume-1-general-fund
