News · Councils · Hunter
Eleven properties pay 57 per cent of Muswellbrook's rates. No council in NSW leans harder on mining
Councils rate land by category, and one of the categories is mining. In 2024-25 Muswellbrook Shire collected $13,164,000 in mining rates from 11 rating assessments, an average of $1,196,727 each. That is 57.3 per cent of its rates revenue, the highest mining share of any council in New South Wales, and it is more than twice what every household in the shire pays combined. Singleton is fourth in the state at 35.3 per cent. Neither figure is falling.
The NSW Office of Local Government publishes a time series workbook covering every council in the state. We have used it before, for the seven financial ratios it stopped collecting and for the infrastructure backlog benchmark. It also carries rating revenue split by category, and that split has never been reported for this region.
It is worth understanding what a rating category is before reading the numbers. Under the local government rating system a council sorts every rateable property into residential, farmland, business or mining, and sets a rate for each. A working coal mine is a small number of large parcels. So a mining category can be worth an enormous amount of money while containing almost no properties, and that is exactly what the Hunter's numbers show.
Mining rates by Hunter council, 2024-25
| Council | Mining rates | Share of rates | Assessments | Average each |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Muswellbrook | $13,164,000 | 57.3% | 11 | $1,196,727 |
| Singleton | $9,304,000 | 35.3% | 39 | $238,564 |
| Cessnock | $1,607,000 | 3.1% | 5 | $321,400 |
| Lake Macquarie | $1,484,000 | 0.9% | 16 | $92,750 |
| Maitland | $497,000 | 0.6% | 2 | $248,500 |
| Upper Hunter | $158,000 | 1.2% | 1 | $158,000 |
| Dungog | nil | 0% | 0 | n/a |
| Newcastle | nil | 0% | 0 | n/a |
| Port Stephens | nil | 0% | 0 | n/a |
Share of rates is mining divided by the four rating categories added together. Across the state, 37 of the 127 councils with figures collect any mining rates at all.
Muswellbrook is first in the state, and it is not close
Ranked by mining share of rates revenue, Muswellbrook leads every council in New South Wales at 57.3 per cent. Blayney is second at 47.0 per cent, Mid-Western Regional third at 38.2, and Singleton fourth at 35.3. Lithgow, another coal district, is seventh at 20.1.
The concentration is the part worth sitting with. Muswellbrook's mining category is 11 assessments. Its residential category raised $6,513,000. So eleven properties pay 2.02 times what every household in the shire pays between them, and the average mining assessment is billed close to $1.2 million a year.
Singleton is differently shaped and worth reading beside it. Its mining rates are only slightly smaller in total, $9,304,000, but they are spread over 39 assessments averaging $238,564, and its residential base is larger than its mining one. Same industry, a much less concentrated dependence.
It is not easing
The workbook for the year before lets us check the direction, which matters more than any single year.
| Council | 2023-24 mining | Share | 2024-25 mining | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Muswellbrook | $12,111,000 | 56.2% | $13,164,000 | 57.3% |
| Singleton | $8,804,000 | 35.3% | $9,304,000 | 35.3% |
| Cessnock | $1,528,000 | 3.2% | $1,607,000 | 3.1% |
| Upper Hunter | $137,000 | 1.1% | $158,000 | 1.2% |
Muswellbrook's mining rates rose by $1,053,000 and its share went up a point. Singleton's rose by $500,000 and its share held exactly. Whatever else is changing in the Hunter's coal economy, the rate base of the two most exposed councils has not started shifting away from it.
Why this is worth knowing now, and what it does not mean
The retirement schedule for coal-fired generation is published and dated. AEMO's 2026 Electricity Statement of Opportunities lists Eraring closing in April 2029 and the remaining fleet through the 2030s. That is generation rather than extraction, and Hunter coal serves export markets as well as domestic ones, so nothing here says a mine closes on a particular date.
Our view, labelled as such. What the figures do say is that a council's exposure is not spread across an industry, it is spread across a handful of assessments. A diversified rate base absorbs a bad year. Eleven assessments carrying 57 per cent of rates income is a different kind of arrangement, and the question it raises for Muswellbrook ratepayers is not whether mining will stop, but what the council's plan is for the year its largest category changes shape. That is a question worth putting to a council in a budget cycle, and it is easier to ask holding the number.
Three things this does not show. It is not a claim that any mine is closing or that any council is in difficulty. It is not the council's total income, only its rates: grants, user charges and other revenue sit outside these columns. And a rating category is about land, so land does not stop being rateable when its use changes, though what it is worth in a different category is not something this workbook answers.
How we did this
Every figure comes from the NSW Office of Local Government time series workbooks, which we
downloaded and read directly: the 2024-25 file published May 2026 and the 2023-24 file published
February 2026. Both are plain downloads. The data sits on the sheet named Councils
with a trailing space in the sheet name, headers on row 3, data from row 4, 124 indicator
columns and 131 council rows.
Mining, residential, farmland and business rates revenue are columns titled Total Mining Rates Revenue, Total Residential Rating Revenue, Total Farmland Rates Revenue and Total Business Rates Revenue. Share of rates is mining divided by those four added together, computed by us; the workbook does not publish a share. Averages are our arithmetic on mining revenue divided by the assessment count, and we checked every one against the workbook's own Average Mining Rate column, which matched to the dollar in all ten of the state's top councils by share. We located columns by reading their header text rather than by position, so that the two years are compared on the same fields.
We have not contacted any council or mining operator. This is arithmetic on a published state dataset. Where we have drawn an inference it is labelled as our view, and no individual is named.
Spotted an error in this story? Ask for a correction. Corrections are published, dated and left visible.