From Auckland Rate-Payers Alliance
Our annual local government league tables – Ratepayers’ Report – co-published with our friends at the Taxpayers’ Union have just gone live!
And if you’re not a fan of the massive Council bureaucracy, you should stop reading…
The league tables expose that Auckland Council along with its Council-Controlled Organisations employ some 11,943 full-time staff at a cost of $1.3 billion a year. That’s $2,077.82 for every Auckland household!
Susan, it means more than half of your rates bill is going to staff salaries alone.
The Ratepayers’ Report is a set of league tables that allow New Zealanders to compare their local council with others around the country.
What you need to know:
If you thought the lion’s share of your rates bill was going to paying for basic services like rubbish collection, roads, and community facilities – think again.
The Council’s HQ alone employs 194 staff paid more than $200,000 a year and at least 52 staff are paid over $256,800 – the base salary for a Government Minister!
The Council employs some 948 managers and 77 communications staff (i.e. spin doctors) all paid six figure salaries.
Then there is the consultants and contractors – a whopping $153 million spend last year, totalling $251 per household. And despite his promises to cut the consultant spend, the amount is actually growing under Wayne Brown!
And these figures don’t even include the likes of Auckland Transport and Watercare, which Auckland Council conveniently excluded from their response to our official information request…
Other findings: why Auckland ratepayers are paying too much
Auckland Council’s debt problem is getting worse. The Council now owes creditors around $15 billion – that’s $24,014 per Auckland household, up $2,831 in just one year!
And money isn’t free. The interest on the Council’s debt is costing Auckland households $1,061 per year. That means one third of the average rates bill is on interest!
Now, there’d be no problem if Auckland Council was borrowing to pay for much needed infrastructure – roads, water pipes, and facilities that benefit everybody.
But you and I both know that far too much has been wasted on things that Aucklanders don’t actually want: gold-plated cycleways, speed humps, empty busways, and vanity waterfront projects.
And it’s not just big-ticket items.
Even small projects end up ridiculously over-engineered—like the $263,000 spent replacing the steps in the picture (which became a symbol of Council waste).
The key message from the Ratepayers’ Report is that it doesn’t need to be like this. Bigger is not always better, when it comes to council efficiency.
Across the board, councils throughout the country are showing that doing more, with less, is possible.
Meanwhile, while our rates have grown, what’s become “super” isn’t our roads, pipes, or public services – most of the money has gone onto a ‘supersized’ payroll.
That’s why we support measures like capping rates to inflation!
Full rankings here – https://ratepayersreport.nz/2026/demographics-rates/…