Australian council-level household running cost dataset 2026-27

Two files. suburbcost-council-running-costs.csv reports annual household running costs for 148 local government areas in Queensland and New South Wales for 2026-27: the council rate plus median water, modelled driving commute, building insurance and body corporate, aggregated over the 6,158 suburbs inside each council. suburbcost-council-rates.csv reports the residential council rate for all 227 councils across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, rate columns only, and is the only file covering Victoria. The three states do not publish the same statistic and the rate column is not comparable across them. Queensland publishes a minimum residential general rate for an owner-occupied principal place of residence, which is a floor: most owner-occupiers pay more, scaled to land value. New South Wales publishes an average residential rate through the Office of Local Government, uplifted here by each council's IPART rate peg, which sits at a typical bill rather than below it. Victoria publishes Local Government Performance Reporting Framework indicator FIM-E4, the average rate per property assessment across all rateable property types, excluding service rates and charges, so it is diluted by commercial, industrial and farm assessments and is not a residential bill at all. A minimum, an average and a per-assessment average are three different quantities. Sorting the rate file by rate_aud and reading the top produces a wrong answer, and a mean of that column is not a number that means anything. Group by state first. Every row names its own basis in rate_statistic and carries comparable_across_states = no. Victoria is also a year behind, reported as published at 2024-25 rather than uplifted, because an uplift would be an estimate sitting in a column of measured figures. Within the running-cost file the rate column holds four statistics, named per row in council_rate_basis. 21 Queensland councils report a minimum residential general rate. 126 New South Wales councils report an average residential rate, 7 of them uplifted by an approved special rate variation above the peg rather than by the peg. Redland City reports a median-valued-property figure. Nothing is excluded. Only 50 of 148 rows carry no data-quality flag, so a clean-rows-only file would hide which councils were dropped. Every gap is a column instead: substituted council rates, estimated water, and the flat regional driving allowance that applies to all suburbs in 52 councils. 18 Queensland councils have no row of their own in the running-cost file and their suburbs carry a neighbouring council's rate. This is disclosed per row in suburbs_rate_standin. Building insurance and body corporate are estimated rather than sourced and are marked with an _est suffix. The commute figure is modelled from straight-line distance and is not a measured journey. This is a derived council-level aggregate. Suburb-level data is not published. SuburbCost publishes no property prices, land valuations or capital growth. Canonical page and full documentation: https://www.suburbcost.com.au/dataset/