How Council Scorer Works

Every score on Council Scorer comes from published government data and a method you can check. This page sets out where the data comes from, what it measures, how it becomes a score, and where the method has limits.

Data sources

Council Scorer is built on statutory reporting — the data councils are required to publish, not surveys or opinion. Victorian scores draw on the Local Government Performance Reporting Framework (LGPRF). New South Wales scores use the Office of Local Government's published council data. Queensland scores use the Queensland Government's departmental local government reporting.

Around that core sit two context layers: ABS census demographics, and ACARA (MySchool) school data for suburb-level context. Every dataset is published, public and checkable, and no council or advertiser supplies or pays for data. The full list lives on the data sources page.

What we measure

Every council is scored on the same four dimensions. Sustainability covers financial resilience, debt and reserves — whether the council can keep doing its job next decade, not just next year. Community Services covers libraries, family support and inclusion. Lifestyle & Amenity covers parks, sport, culture and public space. Core Operations covers roads, waste, planning approvals and everyday delivery.

Each dimension is built only from indicators the state actually publishes. That is a deliberate constraint: it keeps every number traceable to a statutory source, and it means I measure what councils report — not everything councils do.

How scores are calculated

Raw indicators arrive in different units — dollars, days, rates per thousand — so each one is first ranked against the same indicator for every council in the same peer group, and that rank is converted to a percentile from 0 to 100. A dimension score is then the average of the percentiles of the indicators that make up that dimension. Peer grouping is the heart of the method. A shire of 300 people should not be ranked against Sydney; it should be ranked against other rural shires facing the same economics.

Read the number carefully, because averaging percentiles is not the same as counting peers beaten. A dimension score ranks a council against comparable councils and higher is always better, but a score of 70 does not mean the council outperforms 70 per cent of its peers on that dimension. Averaging several indicator percentiles pulls scores toward the middle, so a council can score 40 and still sit at the bottom of its peer group, or score 70 and be beaten by more peers than the number suggests. Use the score for ordering — who is ahead of whom — and use the peer-group rank shown on each profile when you want an actual count of councils.

Where all four dimensions have a published source — Victoria and New South Wales — the dimensions combine into a composite score out of 100, which drives the state rank and the tier labels from Excellent (80 and above) down to Needs Improvement (below 35). The same caution applies to the composite: it is an average of averages, not a percentage of councils beaten. Where a state does not publish all four, as in Queensland, no composite is calculated and the published dimensions stand on their own.

What each state publishes

The three states do not publish the same things, so Council Scorer does not pretend they do. Victoria reports through the Local Government Performance Reporting Framework (LGPRF), 2024-25, which covers indicators across all four dimensions — financial sustainability, community services (libraries, maternal and child health, aquatic facilities), lifestyle and amenity (parks, recreation, culture) and core operations (waste, roads, planning approvals, animal management).

New South Wales reports through the Office of Local Government's Your Council data, 2023-24, which also spans all four dimensions: financial performance and debt, community and library services, recreation and open space, and operational delivery including waste, roads and development assessment.

Queensland reports through the Queensland local government comparative information 2024-25, published by the Department of Local Government, Water and Volunteers. It carries financial sustainability indicators (operating surplus ratio, asset sustainability, net financial liabilities and debt measured against operating income) and operational indicators (roads, waste and everyday delivery). It publishes no community-services measures at all, and a single amenity measure, which is shown as context rather than scored.

Because two of the four dimensions have no Queensland source, Queensland councils are scored on Sustainability and Core Operations only, and no Queensland composite score is calculated. Nothing is estimated, interpolated or carried forward in place of the missing dimensions — the page says “not published by Queensland” and leaves it there. Queensland debt and liability ratios are denominated against operating income, as the state publishes them.

Queensland source data is used under CC BY 4.0 Australia — © State of Queensland (Department of Local Government, Water and Volunteers).

Update frequency

Each state publishes on its own cycle, generally annually and lagging the financial year it describes. The current scores use 2024-25 statutory reporting for Victoria and Queensland, and 2023-24 for New South Wales. When a state releases a new reporting year, scores are rebuilt from the new data — they do not drift between releases.

Each council profile records the year its underlying data was last updated and a confidence rating reflecting how complete that council's reporting is.

Known limitations

Honest scoring means being clear about what the method cannot do. States measure different things, so comparisons are strongest within a state and within a peer group; there is no national ranking, because ranking councils scored on different indicator sets would be a false precision. Some indicators are financial or compliance proxies rather than direct measures of lived service quality — a road can be funded on paper and still annoy you in person. Councils with missing or late returns carry a lower confidence rating, shown on their profile. And percentiles are relative by design: every peer group has a bottom quartile even in a year when everyone improves.

Scores are comparative signals, not verdicts on individual decisions, councillors or staff. South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory are not yet covered — their reporting frameworks do not currently support the same depth of comparison.

Corrections policy

Corrections are welcome and taken seriously. Every submission is checked against the original statutory source. Where the source shows an error, the correction is applied and the affected scores are rebuilt — publicly, not quietly. Scores are never altered at a council's request without a statutory source to support the change. Spotted something? Use the contact page.

Top-performing councils

See the full rankings for all 284 councils