Council expenditure per capita — every local authority ranked
Figures as of 2026, published by Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage — Local Authority Budgets. Accessed 2026-08-28.
Colour shows each council's adopted gross expenditure per resident, from DHLGH's Local Authority Budgets.
Names below aren't links — there is no single page on this site for one local authority on its own yet.
| Rank | Local authority | Council expenditure per capita | Year on year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Limerick City And County Council | €4,491 | +1.8% |
| 2 | Dublin City Council | €2,863 | +14.2% |
| 3 | Galway City Council | €1,910 | +11.9% |
| 4 | Leitrim County Council | €1,822 | +6.7% |
| 5 | Longford County Council | €1,707 | +5.2% |
| 6 | Tipperary County Council | €1,633 | +10.2% |
| 7 | Waterford City And County Council | €1,628 | +7.0% |
| 8 | Clare County Council | €1,596 | +6.4% |
| 9 | Mayo County Council | €1,592 | +2.9% |
| 10 | Kerry County Council | €1,588 | +9.7% |
| 11 | Monaghan County Council | €1,495 | +4.1% |
| 12 | Louth County Council | €1,458 | +10.7% |
| 13 | Laois County Council | €1,446 | +7.4% |
| 14 | South Dublin County Council | €1,404 | +7.8% |
| 15 | Cavan County Council | €1,368 | +5.4% |
| 16 | Westmeath County Council | €1,345 | +10.5% |
| 17 | Carlow County Council | €1,345 | +2.4% |
| 18 | Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council | €1,341 | +11.5% |
| 19 | Donegal County Council | €1,329 | +11.6% |
| 20 | Fingal County Council | €1,311 | +11.4% |
| 21 | Kilkenny County Council | €1,242 | +7.4% |
| 22 | Offaly County Council | €1,227 | +5.6% |
| 23 | Roscommon County Council | €1,225 | +8.0% |
| 24 | Wicklow County Council | €1,182 | +9.6% |
| 25 | Sligo County Council | €1,177 | +2.3% |
| 26 | Meath County Council | €1,172 | +11.5% |
| 27 | Kildare County Council | €1,153 | +9.7% |
| 28 | Wexford County Council | €1,121 | +4.7% |
| 29 | Galway County Council | €1,051 | +5.0% |
Before you use these figures
- Adopted budget, not actual spend: These figures are each council's ADOPTED annual revenue budget -- what it planned to raise and spend for the year -- not the audited actual outturn. DHLGH's Annual Financial Statements record what was actually spent, but are not published in structured or open form anywhere found in this project's research (checked datacatalogue.gov.ie directly: this collection's own dataset entry records `open_data: No`). A council's actual spending can differ from its adopted budget.
- Cork City and Cork County have no per-capita figure: CSO's Census 2022 publishes one combined population figure for Cork City and Cork County following the 2019 boundary change, not a per-authority split (see seed_la_population.py). Rather than manufacture a split, both authorities are left out of this per-capita series -- the gap is in population data, not budget data. Both councils' own-source income share figures are published normally.
- 8 of 12 candidate years (2015-2026): DHLGH publishes one amalgamated PDF per year. Of the twelve years from 2015 (the first budget under the current 31-authority structure) to 2026, four could not be extracted or reconciled reliably against the PDF's own printed totals and are excluded rather than loaded with uncertain numbers: 2017 and 2019 fail extraction outright; 2018 and 2022 extract but at least one figure does not reconcile against the source's own total. The years shown are not consecutive, so year-on-year change is only available where two directly adjacent years both cleared validation.
- Shown per-capita / as a share, not as raw totals: databeat deliberately does not publish each council's raw Gross Expenditure or Total Income here. Dublin City's adopted budget dwarfs Leitrim's mainly because Dublin City is far larger, not because it spends differently per resident -- a raw euro figure would mostly retell a population story. Own-source income share and expenditure per capita are the comparisons that actually distinguish councils' financial positions from their size.
- Population is a fixed 2022 snapshot: Expenditure per capita divides each budget year's Gross Expenditure by a single Census 2022 population figure (migration 011_la_population.sql), not a year-matched estimate. For budget years other than 2022 this trades a small, disclosed staleness in the denominator for an honest population-adjusted comparison.