Adams and Adams announce $116 billion FY 26 NYC budget

Days after the whirlwind New York City mayoral primary race came to a close, Mayor Eric Adams and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams shook hands Friday on a $115.9 billion budget for the upcoming fiscal year. The plan exceeded last year’s adopted budget of $112.4 billion, once again making it the largest in city history.

Setting the contentious past year aside – at least for the time – Mayor Adams’ tone on Friday evening was breezy and celebratory. “This has been the easiest budget that we had to pass, because we knew what we expected from each other and what we needed to deliver, and we were able to accomplish that,” he said.

Speaker Adams (no relation) said it was “pretty close” to a perfect budget, saying they’ve come a long way from more fraught budget cycles when the council had to fight to restore funding that the mayor’s office proposed cutting at city agencies. 

One of the last-minute sticking points in this year’s negotiation was funding for immigration legal services – a pot of money advocates and the City Council have been fighting to increase under the Trump administration’s deportation efforts.

On Friday, both the mayor and speaker touted an increase of roughly $50 million for legal services for immigrants. “In response to the Trump administration’s campaigns targeting the rights of our immigrant communities, we insisted that this budget increase funding for immigration legal services,” Speaker Adams said. Mayor Adams, who has committed to working with the Trump administration on immigration enforcement, also said that the funding will help protect “hard-working immigrants” and people who live in fear of deportation.

The three largest categories of city spending are typically education, pension benefits for city employees and social services. This year’s budget will include a pilot program offering free child care to babies under 2 years old in low-income families, Gothamist first reported. An additional ten libraries will be open on Sundays in the new budget, The New York Times reported. The adopted budget will also include new funding for victim services programs, funding for 60 new staff positions in a long-stalled Division of Sustainable Delivery regulating e-bike deliveries and funding for childcare vouchers after the state backed off on paying for the popular program. 

Friday afternoon’s handshake is symbolic. Monday, the City Council is expected to officially vote on the budget, which will outline spending for the fiscal year beginning July 1 and ending on June 30, 2026. The finalized budget – the most consequential piece of legislation the city government passes each year – is the result of months of hearings and negotiations after Mayor Adams released his $115 billion executive budget proposal in May and his preliminary proposal in January. The mayor, facing an uphill battle to reelection, called his proposal the “best budget ever” focused on making New York City “the best place to raise a family.”

The threat of further funding cuts from Washington D.C. and broader economic uncertainty has hung heavy over budget negotiations. Some budget experts have cautioned that the mayor’s initial proposal left little to no wiggle room should federal cuts or a broader recession occur. Roughly 8% of last year’s budget came from federal funding. That figure was about 6.4% – or $7.4 billion – in the mayor’s executive budget proposal for the coming fiscal year, according to a report from state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. On Friday, the mayor’s office touted the amount they were able to put toward reserves: $8.5 billion, as a record high. The mayor’s office projected budget gaps of $5 billion, $6.1 billion, and $6 billion in fiscal years 2027, 2028 and 2029, respectively, saying tax revenue is expected to slow in coming years.

Despite timely agreement on the budget this year, there’s been a lot of tension between the City Council and Mayor Adams since last year’s budget. While their relationship was somewhat adversarial before the mayor’s federal indictment in September, things have only grown more heated in the months since – particularly after President Donald Trump’s Justice Department dismissed the corruption charges against Mayor Adams. Many City Council members including Speaker Adams called on him to resign as he cozied up to Trump. Many have been highly critical of the mayor’s relationship with the president and his immigration-related decisions, even suing after the Adams administration sought to allow federal immigration authorities to return to Rikers Island.

Unlike the somewhat low-key negotiations that marked the past couple of months, the last two budget cycles were highly contentious. The City Council fought back in both years against a flurry of across-the-board cuts proposed by the mayor, which he’d argued were necessary to offset budgetary gaps exacerbated by spending for asylum-seeker services as hundreds of thousands of migrants arrived in the city starting in spring 2022. Diverging budget projections from the Adams administration, the City Council and budget watchdogs only further complicated the process. Some cuts were ultimately restored, but not without a long, bruising battle that makes this year’s process look relatively amicable.

This year’s Democratic primary – for a brief time, at least – featured nearly all of the major power players in the city budget process. When Speaker Adams launched a bid for mayor this spring, she’d initially done so under the impression she’d be facing Adams in the Democratic primary. (He dropped out to run as an independent shortly after she launched.) Comptroller Brad Lander, also a Democratic mayoral candidate, weighs in on the negotiation process, too. The cutthroat nature of the mayoral race seeped into the budget process when Speaker Adams demoted Council Members Selvena Brooks-Powers and Lynn Schulman from the council’s Budget Negotiation Team after they endorsed ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo for mayor. Meanwhile, Council Finance Committee Chair Justin Brannan was busy mounting an unsuccessful run for comptroller.