About this data
- Spending is divided by each area's population in mid-2025. Areas are counties and unitary authorities (including London boroughs and metropolitan districts); where an area has a county council and district councils, their budgets are added together.
- Figures are net service expenditure on day-to-day (revenue) spending: what authorities spend on services after income from sales, fees and charges, and grants paid directly for particular services outside the main funding system, are taken off. Capital spending, housing benefit payments and council housing (the Housing Revenue Account) are not included. Spending funded by the NHS, such as through the Better Care Fund, is also excluded.
- Education spending falls as schools become academies, which are funded directly by central government, not through councils. So differences between areas, and changes over time, partly reflect how many schools are academies.
- Only councils are counted: the Greater London Authority (including Transport for London), police, fire, combined and waste authorities are left out.
- The City of London isn't shown: it has about 15,000 residents but provides services for a working population of over half a million, so its spending per resident (over £24,000) isn't comparable. The Isles of Scilly, with 2,300 residents, have high costs per person.
- Coventry, Cumberland, Dudley, Greenwich and South Gloucestershire councils, and Castle Point, Epping Forest, Guildford and Warwick district councils, hadn't sent their budgets to MHCLG in time, so there are no figures for those areas (or for Essex, Surrey and Warwickshire).
This chart appears in Public spending.