Australian council-level household running cost dataset
A free, citable dataset of what it costs to run a home in 147 Queensland and New South Wales local government areas. Each row carries the council rate, plus median water, modelled commute, insurance and body corporate for the suburbs inside that council. Released under CC BY 4.0 so it can be used in research, reporting and policy work with attribution.
A council-level aggregate of SuburbCost's running-cost model, covering 147 local government areas across two Australian states for 2026-27. It reports what a household spends each year on council rates, water, driving and insurance, not what a property costs to buy. 147 rows, 21 columns, 31 KB of CSV.
At a glance
- Councils
- 147
- Suburbs aggregated
- 6,158
- States
- QLD and NSW
- Period
- 2026-27
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Format
- CSV, UTF-8
Download
Three files. The CSV is the dataset; the dictionary explains every column and the limits; the licence file states the terms and the attribution line.
- suburbcost-council-running-costs.csv, 147 rows, 31 KB
- data-dictionary.md, every column, unit and derivation
- LICENCE.txt, CC BY 4.0 and the attribution string
Read the bases section before computing across states. The council rate column holds four different statistics. A mean across the whole column produces a number that means nothing, and it is the first thing most people compute.
Method
Each row aggregates the suburbs SuburbCost assigns to that council. Medians are computed across all of a council's suburbs, and every dollar figure is rounded to whole Australian dollars, half up. The house total is council rate plus water plus modelled driving commute plus building insurance. The unit total is the unit rate plus water plus body corporate plus commute plus contents insurance, which is a different set of components and not a like-for-like comparison with the house figure. Electricity is excluded from both.
Rate figures come from each council's own budget or revenue statement in Queensland, and from the NSW Office of Local Government "Your Council" release uplifted by the relevant IPART determination in New South Wales. Water comes from the named retailer where one exists. Insurance and body corporate are estimated rather than sourced, and are marked in the column names.
The four rate bases
Queensland and New South Wales do not publish the same statistic, and neither does every council within them. The council_rate_basis column names which one each row carries.
| Basis | Councils | What the figure is |
|---|---|---|
qld_minimum_general_rate_ppr | 20 | The minimum residential general rate for an owner-occupied principal place of residence. A floor. Most owner-occupiers pay more, scaled to land value. |
qld_median_property_rate | 1 | Redland City only, which publishes a median-valued-property figure rather than a minimum. |
nsw_olg_average_residential_uplifted_by_ipart_peg | 119 | The Office of Local Government average residential rate, uplifted by that council's IPART rate peg. An average, not a floor. |
nsw_olg_average_residential_uplifted_by_approved_srv | 7 | The same, uplifted by an IPART-approved special rate variation above the peg. Kept separate so rate-capping research can isolate them. |
A Queensland minimum sits below a typical Queensland bill. A New South Wales average sits at a typical New South Wales bill. Comparing the two directly understates the real gap between the states rather than overstating it. Waste, levies and separate charges are excluded throughout.
What the commute figure is, and is not
The commute column is modelled, not measured, and the model has two regimes. Under 100 km from the relevant centre it tapers with distance. At or beyond 100 km it becomes a flat $18,200, which represents 20,000 km a year of all household driving. That is a different quantity from a commute, and for those councils the column should not be read as one.
| commute_basis | Councils | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
tapered | 54 | No suburb uses the flat allowance. |
mixed | 41 | Some do, so the median may sit either side of the boundary. |
flat_allowance_only | 52 | Every suburb uses it. The figure is not a commute for these councils. |
Distance is measured straight-line, so the tapered figures understate real driving. Against 6,212 pinned road routes the median road distance is 1.294 times straight-line, but that factor is only valid for the 4,452 suburbs measured to a state capital. For suburbs measured to a regional centre such as Newcastle, Wollongong, Cairns or Townsville, no road routes exist and the understatement is unmeasured. No correction has been applied to this file.
The error runs in opposite directions. Metropolitan suburbs are understated. Suburbs on the flat allowance are not understated at all, because they are measuring something else.
Estimated fields
Columns ending _est are AI-estimated rather than sourced from a provider. Building insurance and body corporate are estimated for every row, so the marker sits in the column name rather than a per-row flag that would be constant and easy to drop in a subset. The three _incl_est totals contain an estimated component, and because every component is published separately you can reconstruct an estimate-free subtotal from the columns you accept.
Insurance is driven by cyclone exposure, not flood or fire. Its correlation with the published flood and fire ratings is r = 0.053. Means run from $2,522 in New South Wales to about $7,500 north of 16 degrees south. A high insurance figure is a latitude finding before it is a flood finding.
Exclusions and gaps
Nothing is excluded from this file. Only 50 of 147 rows carry no flag at all, so a version restricted to clean rows would be a third of this one and would hide which councils had been dropped. Every row is published and every gap is a column you can filter on.
Twenty-one Queensland councils have no row of their own
93 suburbs belong to councils SuburbCost does not hold a rate for, and they carry a neighbouring council's rate instead. Douglas Shire, 34 suburbs, sits inside Cairns Regional Council, along with Etheridge, Croydon, Cook, Mornington, Aurukun, Kowanyama, Pormpuraaw and Yarrabah. South Burnett sits inside Ipswich. Charters Towers, Flinders, McKinlay, Richmond, Hinchinbrook and Carpentaria sit inside Townsville. Goondiwindi sits inside Toowoomba, Isaac and Livingstone inside Mackay, and Gympie inside Noosa and Sunshine Coast.
The suburbs_rate_standin column gives the count for each row. Cairns Regional Council is the extreme case at 62 of 120 suburbs. Those councils are absent from this dataset, not merely incomplete within it.
Water. 181 suburbs across five Queensland councils carry a neighbouring utility's water figure rather than their own, and in all five it is every suburb in the council: Southern Downs, Mareeba Shire, Tablelands, Cassowary Coast and Western Downs.
Unassigned suburbs. A further 64 suburbs, all in New South Wales, carry no council assignment and appear nowhere in this file.
Small councils. Mosman Council holds a single suburb, so its median is one observation. 39 councils span more than one commute centre, so their median commute mixes trips to different destinations.
Multiple rates. Two Queensland councils set more than one minimum by locality. Logan stores two values and Western Downs three. Each row carries the modal value and council_rate_variant_count says so.
Data dictionary
The full dictionary ships with the data as data-dictionary.md. Every column is listed here.
| Column | Type | Meaning | Units |
|---|---|---|---|
council_name | text | Council name as SuburbCost publishes it. Derived from councilSource. | n/a |
state | text | QLD or NSW. Suburb coverage is these two states only. | n/a |
suburbcost_slug | text | Resolves to https://www.suburbcost.com.au/council-rates/{slug}. | n/a |
suburb_count | integer | Suburbs SuburbCost assigns to this council. Every median below is computed over exactly these suburbs. | count |
council_rate_aud | integer | The modal stored rate for the council. Read council_rate_basis before using it. | AUD per year |
council_rate_basis | enum | Which statistic council_rate_aud is. Four values, see Bases below. Averaging across them produces a meaningless number. | n/a |
council_rate_year | text | Financial year the rate applies to. Derived, not read from the source string, which names two years for NSW. | n/a |
council_rate_source | text | The source string verbatim, including the approved SRV percentage where one applies. | n/a |
council_rate_variant_count | integer | Distinct rates stored inside this council. 1 for 144 councils. Logan sets 2 and Western Downs sets 3 by locality, so their single published figure is the modal one. | count |
median_total_house_aud_incl_est | integer | Median of council + water + modelled commute + building insurance across the council's suburbs. Contains an estimated component, see Estimated fields. | AUD per year |
mean_total_house_aud_incl_est | integer | Mean of the same. Published alongside the median because the two diverge sharply where a council mixes tapered and flat commute suburbs. | AUD per year |
median_total_unit_aud_incl_est | integer | Median of councilUnit + water + strata + modelled commute + contents insurance. A different set of components from the house total, not a like-for-like comparison. | AUD per year |
median_water_aud | integer | Median water and sewerage. Assumes roughly 190 kL a year. | AUD per year |
median_modelled_commute_drive_aud | integer | Median modelled driving commute. Read commute_basis before using it, see Commute. | AUD per year |
median_insurance_house_aud_est | integer | Median building insurance. Estimated for every row. | AUD per year |
median_strata_aud_est | integer | Median body corporate, units only, 0 for houses. Estimated for every row. | AUD per year |
suburbs_rate_standin | integer | Suburbs in this row whose own council rate is unknown and which carry this council's rate instead. See Substituted rates. | count |
suburbs_water_estimated | integer | Suburbs whose water figure is a neighbouring utility's rather than their own. | count |
suburbs_flat_commute_allowance | integer | Suburbs carrying the flat $18,200 regional driving allowance rather than a tapered commute. | count |
commute_basis | enum | tapered, mixed or flat_allowance_only. See Commute. | n/a |
completeness | enum | complete when all four flag columns are zero, the council stores one rate, and it has at least 3 suburbs. flagged otherwise. Nothing is excluded from this dataset, so filter on the flag columns rather than assuming a clean file. | n/a |
Rounding. Every dollar figure is a whole number of Australian dollars, rounded half up. 68 of the 147 councils hold an even number of suburbs, so their median is the mean of two integers and can land on a half dollar. 57 of the 876 median cells in this file do. Python and R both round half to even by default, so recomputing those medians in either language returns a figure one dollar lower unless you round half up explicitly.
Licence and reuse
This dataset is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). You may share and adapt it, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit.
SuburbCost publishes no property prices, land valuations or capital growth, and none appear in this dataset. Suburb-level rows are not published; this is a derived council-level aggregate.
Cite this dataset
Free to cite with attribution. Please link to this page as the source.
See the figures for a single suburb
This dataset aggregates to council level. SuburbCost shows the same cost model for each of the 6,158 individual suburbs behind it, including water, commute, insurance and estimated electricity.
Compare suburbs side by side →Or browse every QLD and NSW council, read the full methodology, or see the QLD rates study and NSW council ranking built on this data.
Provenance
Generated by generate-dataset.js from SuburbCost's suburb dataset. The version string is the data vintage plus a short hash of the rows, so it changes when a figure changes and not merely because the generator ran. Council rates are 2026-27 for both states. Water is 2025-26 in Queensland and 2026-27 for Sydney Water and Hunter Water, with other regional New South Wales estimated. The commute model uses the ATO rate of 91c per km for 2026-27. Insurance and body corporate are AI-estimated.