Seven of nine Hunter councils ran an operating deficit, and the state stopped publishing the ratio that measures it

Your Council is the NSW government's council comparison site, run by the Office of Local Government, and its data page publishes the underlying spreadsheets. It describes itself as a place to understand how well local government is performing as a whole, and how well individual councils are performing over time and in comparison to similar councils.

Open the 2024-25 workbook and one block of it is empty. The columns are grouped under the heading Your Council's Financial Performance - FDR/financial statements, and seven of the eight carry the same suffix in their own titles: Operating Performance Ratio (%) (2025) Not Collected 2025, and the same for the Unrestricted Current Ratio, Own Source Revenue, Rates and Annual Charges Outstanding, the Debt Service Cover Ratio, the Debt Service Ratio and the Cash Expense Cover Ratio. Every cell beneath them, for every council, reads #N/A. Only Grants and Contributions Revenue survived.

Those seven are the standard measures of whether a council can pay its way: whether it runs an operating surplus, whether it can meet short-term obligations, how much of its income it raises itself, how much cash it holds against expenses. They are the reason a comparison site exists.

The year before, they were all there

This is a change, not a permanent gap. We downloaded the 2023-24 workbook from the same page and it carries all seven with real values, council by council. So the ratios were published for the year to June 2024 and are not published for the year to June 2025.

We could not find an explanation. Neither the Your Council data page nor the Office of Local Government's Your Council Report page says why the 2025 figures were not collected. That is not the same as saying no explanation exists, only that it is not on either page a reader would reach first.

What is still published, and what it shows

The workbook still carries the dollar figures the ratios are built from: total revenue and expenses from continuing operations, and the net operating result before capital grants and contributions. That last one is the closest published thing to the missing Operating Performance Ratio, and it can simply be counted.

In 2024-25, 93 of the 127 councils with a published result were negative. In 2023-24, on the same measure in the same series, 59 were. The share went from 46 per cent to 73 per cent in a single year.

Hunter councils, net operating result before capital, 2024-25

Source: OLG Your Council time series data 2024-25, columns for net operating result before capital and total revenue from continuing operations.

Two Hunter councils were in surplus on this measure and seven were not. Cessnock has the largest deficit in dollars. Dungog has the largest relative to its size, and on that basis it is the sixth deepest in New South Wales, behind Hawkesbury, Walgett, Narrabri, Central Darling and Lockhart.

What this does not mean

A negative net operating result before capital is not a finding that a council is broke, and it should not be read as one. The measure deliberately excludes capital grants and contributions, which is how a great deal of council infrastructure is funded. A council that renews roads and bridges largely with grant money will show a deficit on this line every year while remaining perfectly able to pay its bills. Depreciation on a large asset base pushes the same way.

That is exactly why the missing ratios matter rather than being a technicality. The Operating Performance Ratio exists to turn this raw number into something comparable, and the Unrestricted Current Ratio and Cash Expense Cover Ratio exist to answer the separate question of whether a council can meet its obligations. Without them, a resident looking at their own council has the alarming half of the picture and not the interpreting half.

Nor is a one-year jump from 59 councils to 93 necessarily a story about sudden decline. A change in how something is classified, an asset revaluation, or a year with unusual costs can move a great many councils at once. We are reporting what the state's own file contains, and the honest position is that the figures that would let anyone test which of those it was are the figures that were not collected.

What we would ask

Three questions, and we will publish the answers if we get them. Why were the seven ratios not collected for 2024-25. Whether they will be collected for 2025-26. And whether the Office of Local Government holds the underlying financial data returns that would allow the ratios to be calculated for the missing year, given the dollar figures they are derived from are published in the same workbook.

How we did this. Both workbooks were downloaded from the Office of Local Government and read directly rather than through the comparison interface on yourcouncil.nsw.gov.au. Counts of negative results use the net operating result before capital column, counting every row with a numeric value: 127 councils in each year, 93 negative in 2024-25 and 59 in 2023-24. The Hunter table reproduces the published figures rounded to one decimal place in millions; the share of revenue is our own division of the two published columns and is not a figure the workbook contains. We have not audited any council's financial statements, and OLG says it does not separately audit the returns either. We have not sought comment from the Office of Local Government or from any council, and the three questions above are put in that spirit rather than as findings.

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