Your One-Stop Guide to the 2023 New York State Budget

It’s finally here. Late Tuesday night, lawmakers voted on the last of New York’s 10 budget bills. We broke down what’s in them.

New York Focus   ·   May 3, 2023
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, Governor Kathy Hochul, and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins before three tall stacks of paper.
When the houses of the state Legislature introduce their budget proposals, negotiations will kick off in earnest. | Maia Hibbett for New York Focus

After months of negotiations, New York state finally has a budget. Its planned investments in healthcare, education, transportation, and other areas add up to $229 billion — a compromise between proposals put forth by Governor Kathy Hochul, the state Senate, and the Assembly that the legislature passed on Tuesday. All Republicans and a handful of progressive Democrats voted no, and the rest voted yes.

The vote comes over a month after the budget’s April 1 due date. Throughout the process, Hochul stressed that she was willing to extend negotiations to win her policy priorities. In the end, she only partially got her way on two of her marquee issues — bail and charter schools. Though the budget will change bail laws and could signal to judges that they should jail more defendants pretrial, the changes are less sweeping than what Hochul had proposed. Fourteen new charter schools will be allowed to open in New York City — a sixth as many as the governor originally sought.

Meanwhile, the governor’s signature agenda item for this year, an ambitious plan to boost housing construction across New York, completely disintegrated as negotiations drew to an end. Legislators were unwilling to sign on to Hochul’s most ambitious demands — and no one could come to a compromise. The final budget has virtually no policies to address New York’s record rents and dire housing shortage.

But those big-ticket items are only a few of the issues decided through the state budget process. New York Focus combed through the most important spending and policy choices that lawmakers made. You can find up-to-date numbers — comparing proposals from Hochul, the legislature, and the final budget — in the table that follows.

Below the table, we’ve described the policies in more depth. Use the dropdown arrows to learn more, and check back for updates as more information becomes available.

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