What is the City's Current Fiscal Stress Score?

---

 Published May 2026 

“More than a decade of research consistently finds weak or no association between what local officials perceive about their fiscal condition and what audited financial statements actually reveal.” - Opinion, Cities’ Deeper Fiscal Risk, Governing 

In several articles and social media posts we have referenced the New York State Comptroller’s Fiscal Stress Monitoring System which is “an early warning system for communities and school districts with fiscal problems (to alert) everyone to potential problems (giving) local officials and taxpayers the opportunity to be more proactive.”

In our post last year (see end of article) about the City of Albany’s finances we graphed 10 years of Fiscal Stress scores for the City which demonstrated a concerning trend - the City of Albany moved into a Moderate Stress designation in 2023 and 2024.

However this is old news and a lot has changed.  Can we predict what the City’s Fiscal Stress Monitoring Score will be on or about June 30, 2026?   While we don’t have updated, audited financials we can make reasonable guesstimates based on the recently released Q4/2025 Actuals and other public statements.  We can use this updated data to create a prediction.

The Fiscal Stress Monitoring System rubric (image above) is straightforward (see page 8 in the document).  There are 9 metrics, each metric lists out its data and calculations that produce a value, and each value is evaluated to see if it generates points.  Points are not good.  The worse your values are, the more points you accumulate.  Accumulate 45 points and your local government is "Susceptible to Stress".  Acquire 55 points - "Moderate Stress".  65 or more points?  Your local government receives a "Significant Stress" designation.

We can make reasonable predictions of what our data looks like as of 6/30/2026, driven by a number of factors:  

• We will likely need to engage in short-term cash-flow borrowing
• Our general fund is in a precarious position
• Our debt service is likely increasing
• Employee benefits costs are increasing rapidly

Given that, we can chart (above) our likely scores as of 6/30/2026.  For each of the 9 metrics the tables lists:

• each metric’s value as of 2024
• the number of points that each value yielded in 2024
• the maximum number of points possible for the metric
• The next worse level that will yield more points - for example, for metric #2 we have 18.75 points based on a 2024 value of 6.62%; if our metric's value goes below 0% we will then have 25 points.  There are two metrics (#s 3 & 4) where we have maxed out our points
• Because of the uncertainty we list out both Best and Worst Case scores
• Lastly, we provide our reasoning for our scores.

We calculate that if we were to run the Fiscal Stress Monitoring System on the City of Albany’s finances on 6/30/2026 that our Best Case score would be 73.75 and our Worst Case score would be 86.68.  The threshold for a Significant Stress designation is a score over 65.  

 Lastly, we can chart our historical scores and Best/Worst Case scores over time to see the trend. 

We continue to emphasize that the City of Albany is in trouble.  We use phrases such as “existential crisis” and “we have fallen off of a financial cliff” to impart the magnitude of the issues that we are facing.  If we - royal we, citizens, Common Council members, the Administration - do not appreciate the magnitude of the crisis then we will not deploy appropriate level of resources and critical decision-making to the crisis.

The takeaway from this exercise is that we can use proven tools, built by the New York State Comptroller, to provide objective evidence of the trouble and challenges that the City faces.  Our estimates of a 73.8 (best case) to 86.7 (worst case) scores would be in the mix for the worst stress scores of any local government in New York State.

Do you believe that our evaluation is unfair?  The good news is that Fiscal Stress Monitoring System is public and open, anyone can perform their own evaluation.  Drop us an email (albanydatastories@gmail.com) or message us on Albany Data Stories Facebook if you’re coming to different conclusions, we’d like to hear alternative perspectives.  

We have shared a copy of the spreadsheet that we used in a Google Drive folder.