Three ways to measure the district's safety margin — spending room, reserves, and days of cash — vs. size-matched peers · June 2026
The question: does Iowa City CSD keep a financial safety margin — and is it shrinking? A district can run short of cushion in three different ways, so we check all three. All three point the same direction: Iowa City keeps the thinnest cushion of any large Iowa district, and the gap to its peers has widened over time.
In each chart, every line is a district. Iowa City is red, the dashed blue line is the peer average, and the faint gray lines are the other large districts (5,000+ students).
What it is: Iowa caps how much a district may spend each year. This shows the unused "room" left over (its Unspent Authorized Budget) as a share of its budget. It's the single most-watched measure of an Iowa district's financial health, and it exists for every district every year — even years where the audit is late — so it gives the full nine-year trend.
Why it matters: when it hits zero or goes negative, the district has overspent its legal authority — which is unlawful and forces a state-supervised recovery plan.
Iowa City started already thin (6.6% in 2017, about half the peer average of 13.3%) and kept drawing it down — touching 0.1% in 2022 and going negative (−1.2%) in 2023, the level that triggers state review. Over the same nine years the peer average rose, from 13.3% to 15.9%. By 2025 Iowa City's cushion (2.3%) was roughly a seventh of the peer average.
What it is: the actual rainy-day cushion — the district's general-fund reserves measured against one year of revenue (the "solvency ratio"), straight from the audited financial reports. In Iowa, 5–15% is considered healthy. Iowa City's audited line runs through 2024; because its FY2025 audit still isn't filed, the 2025 point (hollow) is the district's own unaudited estimate.
Why it matters: reserves are what absorb a bad budget year, a late state payment, or an emergency repair. A thin cushion means little margin for error.
Same story: Iowa City sat at 4.2% in 2020 and slipped to a low of 2.5% in 2023, the thinnest of any large district. Its FY2024 audit shows a partial rebound to 8.1% (the cash-reserve levy at work), but that is still below the 5–15% healthy range and well under the peer average (~16% in 2024). The district's own unaudited FY2025 figure slips back to about 6%, and its FY2025 audit still isn't filed — Iowa City remains the furthest behind of the large districts.
What it is: the district's General Fund cash & investments divided by its average daily spending — "if the money stopped coming in, how many days could the lights stay on?" Unlike the first two, this is actual cash. GFOA recommends keeping at least ~60 days.
Why it matters: it's the cash behind the district's tax-anticipation-warrant and interfund-loan discussions — the most concrete sign of how tight things are. (The days-cash chart is at the top of this page.)
Iowa City has run below the ~60-day guideline every year, falling from ~53 days in 2020 to ~33 in 2023 — the thinnest of any large district, vs. a peer average near 98. The audited FY2024 figure ticked up to ~41 days, but it didn't hold: the district's own unaudited FY2025 number is back to ~33 days — the same as the 2023 low, while peers held ~87. (FY2024 is audited; the FY2025 point is the district's own unaudited figure — the open marker.)
Looking ahead, the district's FY2026 cash position is still uncertain and depends on planned short-term borrowing (a revenue-anticipation warrant and an interfund loan), so it isn't charted here. The district's own projections for it range widely — roughly 7 days of operating cash before that borrowing, versus ~37 days counting it — which is why we show actuals only, through FY2025.
Want the credit-rating view? See Three liquidity lenses (reserves, net cash, and days side by side — how the rating agencies score it), and the district's own intuitive Day's Net Cash Ratio (its internal KPI, computed across all peers back to 2015 against a 90–120 day target), plus the deep-dive reserves trend and operating-cash pages under Other analyses.