Where do NYC’s campaign donors live?

Ever wondered which neighborhood most local political donations come from? Surprise, surprise, it’s the Upper East Side. 

That and other high-income neighborhoods including the Upper West Side, brownstone Brooklyn, and parts of Lower Manhattan are the largest donor bases particularly for mayoral and City Council races.

While low-income areas also donate significantly, the average median income of ZIP codes that have contributed $100,000 or more to citywide races is about $132,000. Still, small dollar contributions of $250 or less make up 88% of total donations to 2025 campaigns. And the vast majority of direct campaign contributions, 97%, have come from individuals – rather than political committees, businesses or other nonindividuals – so far this cycle. (Of course, those entities might be donating bigger bucks to PACs or independent expenditure committees.)

However, looking at our sitting mayor’s donation distribution tells a much different story, with two-thirds of his money coming from large contributions greater than $250, a near reversal from his first campaign. 

All of this information, always public, is now more easily digestible thanks to a collaboration between the New York City Campaign Finance Board and the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center. The donor map, which went live on Jan. 17, illustrates the distribution of campaign contributions citywide for all upcoming municipal office elections. 

“The main reason that we are doing this is mostly to increase transparency and ensure that New Yorkers can see not only who's giving the money, but where that money is coming from,” said Campaign Finance Board Press Secretary Tim Hunter. The Campaign Finance Board is a nonpartisan city agency that facilitates the campaign finance system in New York City through administering public matching funds to campaigns and public disclosure of campaign finance information.

The donor map gets granular with the 59 different city elections coming up, allowing users to dig into individual candidates, ZIP codes, neighborhoods and City Council districts, aggregating individual donations spread across the five boroughs. 

“If you hear a candidate saying, ‘We've gotten so many contributions,’ you can check that on the map and you can see where they've come from. Is it evenly distributed around the city or is it just from one area,” said Steven Romalewski, director of the CUNY Mapping Service team responsible for developing the CFB donor map. “Then you could decide, well, maybe that's meaningful, maybe it's not.”

The data in the map is updated after each filing period, the most recent one having ended on January 11. The map doesn’t currently show the full picture as there are still many months left for more money to rush into candidate’s campaign coffers from all over the city.   

The map shows overall figures including total and average donations as well as pie charts displaying the breakdown of donations from in and outside the city, small and large contributions as well as individual and nonindividual contributions.  

“It's important for voters to consider whether candidates are basing their campaigns on small donations or on larger donations, and we can see that from the map,” said Ben Weinberg, director of public policy at Citizens Union, a 501c4 organization that advocates for policy proposals regarding government transparency and accountability.  

Even though wealthier parts of the city have a larger financial presence in certain municipal elections, the map also shows not all candidates' contribution sources and sizes are the same. Mayoral candidate and Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani touted a cash haul that came from all parts of the city. 

“It's not surprising that a large share of political contributions still come from well-resourced neighborhoods,” said Andrew Epstein, campaign spokesperson for Mamdani. “But even New Yorkers who can only chip in $10 or $20 can make a real impact on the race.”

Currently the most generous neighborhood to Mamdani’s campaign? Not his Astoria home base, but Crown Heights North, according to the donor map.