Ralston Hall is a historic landmark built by Bank of California founder William Chapman Ralston on the campus of Notre Dame de Namur University, and is also home to Notre Dame High School.

It was built around a villa formerly owned by Count Leonetto Cipriani [fr], an Italian aristocrat.

The locally famous "Waterdog Lake" is also located in the foothills and highlands of Belmont.

A surviving structure from the Panama–Pacific International Exposition is on Belmont Avenue (another is the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco).

The name is believed to derive from the Italian bel monte, meaning "beautiful mountain."

[8] The racial makeup of the city was 14,248 (50.3%) White, 370 (1.3%) Black or African American, 102 (0.4%) American Indian and Alaska Native, 8,398 (29.6%) Asian, 148 (0.5%) Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, 1,527 (5.4%) Some Other Race, and 3,542 (12.5%) two or more races.

[12] Among the residents who were not Hispanic or Latino, 13,572 were White, 348 were Black or African American, 22 were American Indian and Alaska Native, 8,330 were Asian, 132 were Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders, 300 were of other races, and 2,108 were of two or more races.

[12] 2020 was the first recent census in which non-Hispanic White people were not the majority of the population in Belmont (47.9%).

In May 2009, Belmont was ranked 11th on Forbes list of "America's Top 25 Towns to Live Well.

[20] Federally, Belmont is in California's 15th congressional district, represented by Democrat Kevin Mullin.

[24] The private Charles Armstrong School specializes in language-based learning differences, such as dyslexia.

In January 2009, Belmont adopted an ordinance that bans smoking in city parks, all businesses, and all multi-story apartments and condominiums.

The policy, which has been described as perhaps the strictest anti-smoking law in the nation, was the result of a group of retirees lobbying the city to stop secondhand smoke from drifting into their apartments from neighboring places.

Public health advocates consider the ordinance to be a new front in a national battle against tobacco; officials from the American Lung Association of California said "Belmont broke through this invisible barrier in the sense that it addressed drifting smoke in housing as a public health issue.

[30] SamTrans provides local bus service within Belmont as well as the entire county of San Mateo.

According to the city's 2021 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report,[34] the top employers in 2021 were: