suburbcost/australian-council-rates

Australian council rates and household running costs, 2026-27

Residential council rates for 227 local government areas across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, plus modelled household running costs for the 148 councils where suburb-level records support them.

File	Councils	States	Contents
suburbcost-council-running-costs.csv	148	QLD, NSW	Council rate, plus median water, modelled commute, building insurance and body corporate, with data-quality flags
suburbcost-council-rates.csv	227	QLD, NSW, VIC	Residential council rates only, each row naming its own basis

Read this before you rank anything

The three states do not publish the same statistic, and this is the whole methodological point of the dataset:

• Queensland publishes the minimum residential general rate for an owner-occupied principal place of residence. It is a floor. Most owner occupiers pay more, scaled to land value.
• New South Wales publishes an average residential rate, via the Office of Local Government, uplifted here by each council's IPART rate peg. It sits at a typical bill, not below it.
• Victoria publishes the Local Government Performance Reporting Framework indicator FIM-E4, the average rate per property assessment across all rateable property types, excluding service rates and charges. It is diluted by commercial, industrial and farm assessments and is not a residential bill.

So sorting the file by rate and reading off the top produces a wrong answer, and a mean of the rate column is not a number that means anything. Group by state first. Every row names its own basis in rate_statistic, and comparable_across_states is no on all 227 rows.

A model trained or evaluated on this file should not learn that Victorian councils are cheap. They are measured differently.

Structure

suburbcost-council-rates.csv, 227 rows:

Column	Type	Meaning
council_name	string	Council name as published
state	string	QLD, NSW or VIC
suburbcost_slug	string	Slug of that council's page
suburbcost_url	string	That council's page
rate_aud	int	The rate figure, whole AUD
rate_statistic	string	What rate_aud measures. Three values, one per state
rate_year	string	Financial year. QLD and NSW 2026-27, VIC 2024-25
rate_source	string	The document the figure came from
comparable_across_states	string	Always no

suburbcost-council-running-costs.csv, 148 rows, 21 columns. Each row aggregates the 6,158 suburbs inside that council. Full column documentation: https://www.suburbcost.com.au/dataset/data-dictionary.md

Splits

There are none. Both files are complete reference tables, not a training corpus. Group by state before any comparison.

Limits

• Building insurance and body corporate are estimated, not sourced, and are marked with an _est suffix.
• The commute figure is modelled from straight-line distance and is not a measured journey. For 52 councils it is a flat regional driving allowance rather than a commute at all.
• Victoria is a year behind. The most recent full LGPRF release is 2024-25. It is reported as published rather than uplifted, because an uplift would be an estimate sitting in a column of measured figures.
• This is a council-level aggregate. Suburb-level rows are not published.
• The dataset contains no property prices, no land valuations and no capital growth, and SuburbCost does not publish those anywhere.

Licence and citation

CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

SuburbCost (2026). Australian council-level household running cost dataset, 2026-27. Version 2026-27+24facbc2. https://www.suburbcost.com.au/dataset/ Licensed CC BY 4.0.

Canonical page: https://www.suburbcost.com.au/dataset/

Disclosure

Published by SuburbCost, which runs a consumer site using the same underlying model. Limits are documented above.