Town of Pittsboro
Audited figures filed with the Local Government Commission.
What the figures show
Pittsboro spent $1,850 per resident in 2025, down sharply from $2,713 the year before. That drop is the most striking figure in nine years of filings, and it follows the steepest climb: per-resident spending rose every year from $1,478 in 2017 to that 2024 peak, then fell by nearly a third in one year.
Total spending tells the same story in dollars. It roughly doubled from $6.8 million in 2017 to $14.6 million in 2024, then fell to $11.1 million in 2025. Revenues moved further: $8.3 million in 2017, a peak of $17.5 million in 2023, and $12.8 million in 2025.
Read the rest (126 more words)
The tax base grew steadily underneath all of that. Property tax revenue went from $2.1 million in 2017 to $5.6 million in 2025, and sales tax from $778,000 to $2.3 million. Population grew from 4,581 to 5,996, most of it after 2022.
Two years would be too few to call any of this a trend. Nine are not, and the pattern is a town whose recurring revenue has grown at a fairly even pace while its spending spiked and then dropped. A one-year swing of that size usually means capital work finishing rather than services being cut, but the filings do not say which, and the town's fund balance, long-term debt and tax rate were not reported in any year here. Those three would settle it.
Read from the filed reports below, not from anything said at a meeting.
Year by year
| Year | Population | Revenue | Spending | Spent per resident | Fund balance | Property tax | Long-term debt | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 4,581 | $8,321,709 | $6,769,136 | $1,478 | — | $2,125,026 | — | — |
| 2018 | 4,602 | $8,168,043 | $6,743,421 | $1,465 | — | $2,365,223 | — | — |
| 2019 | 4,615 | $8,297,776 | $7,372,609 | $1,598 | — | $2,428,128 | — | — |
| 2020 | 4,667 | $10,384,463 | $8,377,167 | $1,795 | — | $2,474,699 | — | — |
| 2021 | 4,556 | $10,135,732 | $7,966,368 | $1,749 | — | $2,617,365 | — | — |
| 2022 | 4,627 | $13,449,530 | $9,010,904 | $1,947 | — | $3,514,903 | — | — |
| 2023 | 4,971 | $17,461,674 | $11,524,552 | $2,318 | — | $3,895,751 | — | — |
| 2024 | 5,364 | $16,953,607 | $14,553,527 | $2,713 | — | $4,639,271 | — | — |
| 2025 | 5,996 | $12,777,739 | $11,091,330 | $1,850 | — | $5,592,345 | — | — |
A dash means the field was not in that year's filing. It does not mean zero dollars. These figures come from the Local Government Commission's reporting portal, which serves them a year at a time rather than as a document per filing.