What council tax does and doesn’t pay for

The ring-fence: council tax and council homes

A council that owns homes keeps two separate accounts. The General Fund takes in council tax, government grants, business rates and fees, and pays for the council's services. The Housing Revenue Account takes in tenants' rents and service charges, and pays for managing, repairing and financing the council's own homes. In England and Wales the Local Government and Housing Act 1989 keeps the two apart, and in Scotland the Housing (Scotland) Act 1987: council tax cannot be used to subsidise council rents, and rents cannot be used to keep council tax down.

The exceptions are land and services used by everyone, not only tenants: public open space and play areas on estates, roads and paths that have been adopted as highway, and some garden assistance schemes. Each council decides the split in its own housing policy; this site has not collected those policies. The one published figure is in English councils' returns: the General Fund's contribution to the Housing Revenue Account for items "shared by the whole community", in the table below.

Welsh councils' Housing Revenue Accounts are not in the StatsWales returns this site reads. Figures are each council's latest revenue outturn return; Scottish figures are from Scottish Local Government Finance Statistics.

Following the money: where council rent comes from

Where a social tenant gets Housing Benefit or the housing element of Universal Credit, that money comes from national taxation, is paid to the tenant (or direct to the landlord), and reaches the Housing Revenue Account as rent. The ring-fence still holds, and it is still not paid for by council tax; but some of a council's rent income starts as benefit spending rather than all of it coming from tenants' earnings.

In 2024-25, £22.0bn of Housing Benefit and Universal Credit housing costs went to 3.66 million claims from social renters (council and housing association tenants), an average of £115.76 a week each. Private renters received £12.6bn across 1.77 million claims, an average of £137.24 a week. Spending on social renters was up 11.7% on 2023-24, and the average award up 7.8%.

Set against the 4,970 thousand social rented homes in Great Britain (31 March 2022, the latest count), that is about 74 in 100 social rented homes with a tenant getting housing support, against about 33 in 100 private rented homes. Claims and homes are counted differently, so this is a rough guide.

Source: Department for Work and Pensions, Benefit expenditure and caseload tables: outturn and forecast, published 2026-04-14; Office for National Statistics, Dwelling stock by tenure, UK. The department publishes these for Great Britain and each nation; figures by region or council are only on its Stat-Xplore service, which needs an account.

Where housing support and the rest of the welfare bill are forecast to go is on the welfare bill page; overpayments, underpayments and appeals are on benefit fraud, error and wrongly refused claims.

Parks, street cleaning and roads: what councils spend

These are paid for from the General Fund. Every council's own figures, per resident and, for roads and street cleaning, per mile of road it looks after, are on its "where your council tax goes" page. Gully cleaning and verge cutting are inside road maintenance: no return splits them out, and none splits grounds maintenance between public open space and tenants' gardens.

Who does the work

Where a council publishes its payments over £500, the suppliers it pays for grounds maintenance, street cleaning and road maintenance can be named. Staff wages are not in those records, so a council that does the work itself shows few or no large payments for it. The matching of payments to kinds of work is ours.