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NSW councils
Financial benchmarking for NSW councils.
Ratebase analyses the published financial position of every NSW council: peer percentile ranking, multi-year trends, and long-term financial plan assessment against the Office of Local Government's own standards.
Independent, evidence-based, and built from public data.
10
OLG benchmark ratios
Public
data only
What we do
Councils are required to maintain a ten-year Long-Term Financial Plan, reviewed annually and tested publicly. Those plans face increasing scrutiny from IPART, the Audit Office and the communities they serve.
Ratebase provides the evidence base: where a council sits against comparable councils, how that position has moved, and where a financial plan is most likely to be challenged.
How it's built
Every figure is traceable to its source and reporting year. Councils are compared within their own Office of Local Government peer group. Where a figure is missing, it is shown as missing, not estimated.
- NSW Office of Local Government — Time Series Data (financial ratios)
- Australian Bureau of Statistics — Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA)
- IPART — published special-variation determinations
Who's behind it
Matthew Watt
A senior data analyst working in financial services, with a background in economics and applied financial modelling. Ratebase grew out of building a complete dataset of NSW local government financial performance from public sources.
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