How to Make Money

There are plenty of opportunities to make a quick penny in Cities: Skylines 2 if you know which areas you can best take advantage of and exploit. In this guide, we'll explain several tips to help your city make money quickly in Cities: Skylines 2.

How to Make Money in Cities: Skylines 2

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• Sell Excess Electricity and Water to Neighboring Cities
• Create Districts and Impose Parking Fees
• Increase Zone Taxes
• Reduce Service Budgets
• Don't Invest in Services and Upgrades Unless They're Needed

Sell Excess Electricity and Water to Neighboring Cities

When it comes to making quick and easy money in Cities: Skylines 2, the best method is to export electricity and water to neighboring cities as soon as possible. While a Small Coal Power Plant or Wind Turbine will do the trick when starting out, upgrading to a Geothermal Power Plant will offer a good return on exported electricity.

While running costs can be high, as long as your plant runs efficiently, you should have no issues turning a profit. When clicking on the building, you can learn what affects your plant's efficiency by hovering over the efficiency statistic. Doing so will showcase areas or services you can improve on.

Create Districts and Impose Parking Fees

When creating a district, you can impose special policies such as Energy Consumption Awareness, Recycling, and even a Roadside Parking Fee. Here, you can opt to charge a conservative fee of $10-$20 or even upwards of $50 for any vehicles parking on the roadside. With thousands of cars often lining your streets, imposing such a fee can be a substantial additional income source.

While it appears to be a bug, at launch, you can set parking fees to the maximum fee price of $50 and see no complaints from your citizens. As you can imagine, this fee can earn you a hefty sum towards helping turn your monthly balance green. You can also impose this outrageous fee at parking lots to further increase your income. Once this gets patched, remember to adjust this number. Otherwise, you may have some rather unhappy citizens.

Increase Zone Taxes

Nobody likes taxes, but if you’re trying to stay afloat with monthly positive revenue, you may need to consider adjusting your city taxes until you can balance your budget or find other revenue sources.

When visiting the Taxation tab in the Economy menu, you’ll find four sliders, each representing a zone type that can be further expanded. Each zone type can have its Tax Rate raised or lowered. As you adjust these sliders to your desired tax rate, an immediate estimation of their monthly revenue will be displayed at the bottom of the tab.

Finding the right balance that works best for your citizens will take some time and testing to get just right. While every city is different, our citizens within a Massive Metropolis were quite content with a tax rate between 8% to 12% for Residential and 16% for Commercial, Industrial, and Office. While these rates provided a -1 in overall citizen happiness, it wasn't enough to drive people away from our city or cause them to forgo their homes.

Just be warned:?raise your tax rate slowly over a few months. The true impact of a price rise isn’t immediate, as it takes a few months for residents to fall behind on payments, unable to maintain the property maintenance, or even struggle with everyday living costs before ultimately moving on to a new home or even homelessness, which sees homeless families residing in public parks until they can afford a place to live.

Reduce Service Budgets

One of the most significant impacts on your monthly budget is most likely your Service Upkeeps, as when planned or managed poorly, it's not unexpected to have them be the cause of running your monthly revenue dry. That's why we highly recommend adjusting your Service Budgets, which can be found under Services in the Economy menu.

Here, you can adjust the budget for particular City Services to save on operating expenses or earn a little extra from increasing service fees. Just be warned, lowering the budget slider will decrease the number of employees hired and the service's quality and performance.?

The impact of your changes is not immediate on your citizens, so keep that in mind before making drastic reductions, as it could result in a costly mistake that will take time to recover from.

Don't Invest in Services and Upgrades Unless They're Needed

If you're still struggling to stay afloat or have your monthly balance remain in the green, we recommend reassessing your city's development strategy. Things you should consider are services and their upgrades, as well as their general upkeep costs, as these will be a significant factor that hugely impact your budget.

While things such as Hospitals, Universities, Fire Stations, and service upgrades such as increased storage capacity and efficiency are fantastic to add to your city, it is possible to add them too early in your city's development. That's why we recommend staying clear of all services not vital to your city's ability to function or proceed with future expansions.

When adding new services to your city, you want to wait to perform any upgrades, as you should always ask yourself, does your Post Office really need that extra Mail Storage Extension or Post Van Garage? Will another Fire House suffice instead of investing $2.15 million on a Fire Station with a monthly upkeep of $188,000?

As shady as it may seem, you would be surprised at what your city can get away with while keeping citizens happy and your budget in the green.