Compare all 317 English councils on council tax, highest-paid official pay, crime, schools, housing, asylum, deprivation and more — 59 data fields from 12 official government sources.
What does your council charge you? What does the boss earn? How many homes sit empty while families wait for one? Who pays the full rate — and who doesn't?
The highest-paid official in the average council earns £194,230 in total remuneration — salary, pension, benefits. Across full councils, the average Band D bill is £1,920. On average, it takes 126 households paying their full annual council tax to cover one top official's pay. In Wandsworth, it takes 548.
We also calculated the effective tax rate — what your council tax costs as a share of your property's actual value. In Hartlepool, it's 1.61%. In Westminster, 0.06%. A twenty-seven-fold gap, because council tax bands are still based on 1991 property values — set by estate agents who drove past in second gear, doing four hundred homes a day without leaving the car.
Councils with the worst road ratings pay their top officials more, not less. Red-rated councils average £232,569. Green-rated councils average £213,400.
At minimum wage, the average council tax bill costs 157 hours of work — 4.2 working weeks a year.
Nearly half of dwellings receive exemptions or discounts. The fewer households that pay full, the heavier the load on those who do.
Liverpool has 10,674 empty homes and 12,764 families on the waiting list.
Areas with the highest asylum concentration have roughly double the claimant rate, earn around £4,300 less per year, and record about 25% more self-harm admissions than areas with the lowest concentration. We don't claim causation. We ask whether concentrating asylum seekers in the most deprived areas is coincidence or policy.
Band D 2026-27: MHCLG Live Tables. For shire districts, the district precept only.
Executive pay: Total remuneration, TPA Town Hall Rich List 2025 (2023-24 accounts).
Roads: DfT 2025-26 ratings.
House prices: Land Registry HPI Dec 2025.
Crime: ONS recorded crime by Community Safety Partnership, year ending March 2024.
Planning: MHCLG live tables, year ending Dec 2025.
Taxbase: MHCLG Council Taxbase 2025. The percentage paying full rate is taken directly from MHCLG data. MHCLG taxbase categories are not mutually exclusive (a dwelling with a 25% single-person discount counts as both "discounted" and "paying"), so we show the published percentage rather than attempting to derive it from raw counts.
Housing: MHCLG dwelling stock, homelessness tables, LAHS returns.
Asylum: Home Office Asy_D11, data as at 31 March 2025, published in the Dec 2025 edition.
Spending: MHCLG Revenue Outturn 2023-24.
S106: HBF + FOI responses.
Coverage: 317 English councils. 59 data fields from 12 government sources. Data pulled March 2026. Party control as of March 2026, covering unitary, metropolitan and London borough councils (153 of 317). Some councils operate under coalition or minority administrations not fully captured by a single party label. Health data (depression, self-harm, domestic abuse, GP experience, deprivation) is upper-tier only and not available for shire districts.
What this is not: A comprehensive service quality measure. A high ratio doesn't mean a badly-run council. A low effective tax rate isn't the council's fault — it's a 35-year-old banding system nobody has fixed. This tool surfaces questions. It does not answer all of them.