Charlottesville’s FY25 surplus totals $8.5 million

The City of Charlottesville had another budget surplus in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2025 but it was much smaller than in recent years.

Chris Cullinan, the city’s director of finance, has written a letter to Council informing them the yearly audit found a surplus of $8,502,178. That’s about 3.4 percent of the adopted FY25 budget.

“The FY25 surplus is much smaller than the last several years both in both dollar amounts and as a percentage of the adopted budget,” Cullinan said. “ As a percentage of the adopted budget, FY25 surplus is comparable to pre-COVID year end results.”

Cullinan wrote that revenues were $7.5 million higher than expected. Real property tax revenue was 1.6 percent higher than budgeted and the personal property tax brought in 6 percent more than anticipated.

However, sales tax revenue of $14,174,823 was 10.3 percent below what had been budgeted. The amount of money collected through transient room tax was 6.1 percent below the $9.5 million anticipated.

The city anticipated collecting $21,253,218 in the meals tax and was only $47,681 short of that target.

Expenditures were $3.6 million below budget with most of that coming from salaries and benefits that went unpaid.

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