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.
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, from the Audit Office, and from 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.
Who's behind it
Matthew Watt is 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.