Wondering how much your school superintendent earns, which company won a state contract, or where your city’s money went last year? In Texas, much of that information is a free online search away. The state has built out some of the most accessible public-finance tools in the country, and a handful of outside resources fill the gaps. The hard part is knowing where to look.
This guide maps the official, free tools Texans can use to see government salaries, contracts, and spending at the state, local, and federal level. None of these require a fee or a records request. They are public by design, and learning to use them turns vague suspicions about waste into specific, checkable facts.
State spending: the Comptroller’s transparency tools
The first stop is the Texas Comptroller’s Texas Transparency portal, the state’s central hub for financial information. From there, the dashboards and data visualizations give a daily look at state revenue and expenditures. You can explore dozens of revenue categories, compare spending across functions, and see individual payments to vendors, with transaction dates and codes. If you want to know how the state spends its money in broad strokes or trace a specific payment, this is the tool.
The Comptroller also lets you download the underlying data, so researchers, reporters, and curious residents can run their own analysis rather than relying on a summary someone else prepared.
State salaries
For state employee pay, salary information is treated as public, and the Comptroller’s transparency resources include payroll data. A widely used independent tool is The Texas Tribune’s Government Salaries Explorer, which compiles salaries for state agencies and many other public entities into a searchable database. It is a newsroom product rather than a government site, but it is built from public records and is one of the easiest ways to look up a specific position or agency.
Local government: budgets and transparency stars
Cities, counties, school districts, and other local entities publish their own budgets and financial reports, usually on their official websites under a finance or transparency heading. To gauge how openly a local government reports, the Comptroller runs a local transparency program, including a Transparency Stars recognition for entities that publish budgets, contracts, purchasing, pension, and debt data in accessible formats. You can search the list to see whether your city or district has earned recognition and to find links to its disclosures.
School district spending and pay are often available through the district’s website and through the Texas Education Agency’s reporting. For local salaries specifically, the Texas Tribune’s explorer above also covers many districts and local bodies.
Contracts and who got paid
If you want to know which vendors are paid by the state, the Comptroller’s expenditure dashboards show payments to payees. For larger procurement and contracting information, state agencies post solicitations and awards, and the Comptroller’s statewide procurement resources document how contracts are bid and awarded. Tracing a specific contract may take a few clicks, but the records are public.
Federal money flowing into Texas
A large share of public spending Texans care about comes from Washington. The federal government’s official tool is USAspending.gov, where you can filter awards by state, recipient, agency, and program. Want to see federal contracts or grants going to your county? Set the location filter to Texas and start narrowing. It is the federal counterpart to the Comptroller’s state dashboards.
Audits and watchdog reports
Spending data shows where money went; audits show whether it was spent properly. The Texas State Auditor’s Office posts its reviews of state agencies and programs on its reports page, frequently flagging weak controls and improper payments. At the federal level, the Government Accountability Office publishes its findings on waste, duplication, and improper payments at GAO.gov. Reading the relevant audit alongside the spending data gives you both halves of the picture.
When the data isn’t online: open records
Some information will not be posted on any dashboard, and for that Texas gives residents a powerful backstop: the Public Information Act. Under it, you can request records from any state or local government body, including detailed spending breakdowns, contracts, and communications, and the agency must respond, usually within a defined timeframe, or explain why a record is withheld. The Texas Attorney General’s office oversees the process and publishes guidance on how to make a request on its open government pages.
A public information request is more work than a database search, but it is the tool to reach for when the online data stops short of what you need. You do not have to explain why you want the records, and you do not need a lawyer to ask. Many of the biggest accountability stories in Texas began with an ordinary resident or reporter filing a simple request for documents that were public all along.
A note on reading the numbers fairly
Transparency tools answer “what” and “how much,” but they rarely answer “why” on their own. A salary that looks high may reflect years of experience or a hard-to-fill role. A jump in spending may fund a one-time project rather than a permanent increase. A large contract may be the result of competitive bidding that saved money overall. Before drawing a conclusion, it is worth checking the budget context, comparing across years, and reading any related audit. The data gives you the facts; sound judgment comes from putting those facts in context rather than reacting to a single eye-catching figure.
How to put it together
The tools work best in combination. Start with a question, say, why your property tax bill rose, then pull the local budget to see spending, the Comptroller’s data for state context, USAspending for any federal funds involved, and the relevant audit to check for problems. A specific question plus a few official searches will tell you more than any opinion column.
It is also worth knowing that these tools are most powerful when you check the same question across levels of government. A single road project in your neighborhood might draw on city money in the local budget, state money visible in the Comptroller’s data, and federal money searchable on USAspending, all at once. Looking at only one source can make a project seem more or less expensive than it really is, or hide where the funding actually came from. Following a single dollar across city, state, and federal records is the closest a resident can get to the full picture, and every one of those records is free to view.
The broader point for Texans is that this information belongs to you. It is published precisely so residents can hold government accountable without hiring a lawyer or filing paperwork. Bookmark the Texas Transparency portal and USAspending.gov, and the next time someone makes a claim about government waste, you will be able to check it yourself.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
