Methodology
Methodology reviewed: · Rates data vintage: 2026-05-17
Data sources
PlainCouncilTax combines official data from the three Council Tax nations. Northern Ireland uses domestic rates and is outside this dataset.
- Annual Band D rates. England uses MHCLG's 2026-27 area Band D table; Scotland uses the Scottish Government Council Tax dataset; Wales uses Welsh Government / StatsWales Council Tax levels. Together they provide one comparable current and prior-year Band D value for 350 billing authorities.
- Band structures. The Valuation Office Agency service covers property bands in England and Wales. Scotland's valuation roll is maintained by the Scottish Assessors. PlainCouncilTax stores each nation's published thresholds and statutory multipliers separately.
- Property-stock context. The England and Wales distribution figures on council pages come from the VOA's Council Tax: stock of properties 2025 release (vintage 2025-09-09). Scotland is absent from that release, so Scottish pages do not claim an equivalent stock profile.
Supplementary data comes from:
- gov.uk Council Tax statistics collection - annual statistical releases covering average band charges, dwellings by band, and collection rates.
- Local Government Finance Act 1992 - the statutory basis for the band multipliers and billing framework.
Normalization
Council-published charge tables follow a common format dictated by the Local Government Finance Act 1992: every billing authority must publish charges for bands A through H (or A through I in Wales) as a fixed proportion of the council-set Band D rate. We ingest the Band D rate and recompute the band-by-band table using each country's own statutory multipliers, since bands A–D are uniform but E–H are not. England and Wales use 6/9 (Band A), 7/9 (B), 8/9 (C), 9/9 (D), 11/9 (E), 13/9 (F), 15/9 (G), and 18/9 (H) - with Wales adding a ninth band, 21/9 (Band I). Scotland shares the same A–D ladder but raised its E–H bands from 1 April 2017: 473/360 (E), 585/360 (F), 705/360 (G), and 882/360 (H) - a Scottish Band H is ×2.45 of Band D, versus England and Wales's ×2.0.
The published Band D figure typically includes the council's own charge plus precepts from the police, fire, and adult social care budgets. Where councils publish a separate breakdown, we record each precept as a separate column so users can see how the bill is composed.
Coverage and limits
The site is an authority-level comparison, not a property-address register. It publishes Band D rates, nation-specific derived band schedules, rankings, and the England/Wales stock aggregates described above. It does not ingest or expose property addresses, postcodes, individual band assignments, household discounts, or bill-account records. Use the official VOA or Scottish Assessors service to check a specific property's band, and the billing authority's statement for the amount actually due.
Derived metrics
The source tables publish Band D values. PlainCouncilTax labels the following calculations as derived:
- Band schedules - each authority's Band D value multiplied by the statutory ratio for its nation and band.
- Year-on-year change - the percentage and cash movement from 2025-26 to 2026-27. The database contains those two annual observations, not a five-year series.
- Rank, mean, and spread - unweighted comparisons across billing authorities with published values. The UK mean is an authority mean, not a household-weighted typical bill.
- Stock-weighted charge - shown only where the VOA stock release supplies England/Wales band counts. This is an intentional dual-vintage join: dwelling counts from the VOA stock-of-properties 2025 release (as at 2025-09-09) weight each authority's 2026-27 derived band charges. The two populations are never presented as the same fiscal year; Scotland has no VOA stock rows and therefore no weighted charge.
Quality controls
The ETL keeps England, Scotland, and Wales as separate multiplier tables, rejects missing source values rather than estimating them, and records source and vintage metadata for the stock join. Runtime calculations read the same SQLite rows as the CSV and JSON downloads, so rankings, council pages, and exports cannot acquire separate hand-entered copies. If an official national table and a council bill disagree, the council's current bill is the authority for that household; please report the record so we can investigate the upstream edition and our join.
Update cadence
Band D rates are reviewed against the annual national releases around the start of each financial year. The current rates corpus is 2026-27 with a 2026-05-17 data-vintage date. The separate VOA stock distribution is refreshed when a new annual stock release is ingested. A page's editorial review date is not presented as a new data release.
Editorial standards
PlainCouncilTax is an independent editorial operation. We do not accept payment from billing authorities, property-tax service providers, or appeals firms. Process guidance links to the responsible official service for the relevant nation. Published Band D values and stock counts retain the national source values; schedules, changes, ranks, means, spreads, and weighted charges are our labeled calculations.
Reuse and data access
The official upstream figures are Crown copyright and available under the Open Government Licence. PlainCouncilTax publishes its normalized authority compilation as CSV and JSON downloads and provides attributed embed widgets. The download page states the compilation licence and gives the stable URL to cite; individual comparison pages also include a citation block.
Questions about the methodology? Email hello@plaincounciltax.co.uk.