# Where council budgets go

> The service composition of London authority budgets, with council-tax funding kept in context.

- Category: Money
- Cadence: annual
- Status: Published on a annual cadence.
- Dataset key: `where-council-tax-goes`
- Source: [MHCLG](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/local-authority-revenue-expenditure-and-financing-england-2024-to-2025-budget-individual-local-authority-data)
- Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0 — [terms](https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/)
- Canonical page: [https://londongraph.com/g/where-council-tax-goes](https://londongraph.com/g/where-council-tax-goes)
- Machine-readable record: [https://londongraph.com/data/where-council-tax-goes](https://londongraph.com/data/where-council-tax-goes)

## Methodology

MHCLG 2024–25 Revenue Account Budget service totals summed across London. Council tax is pooled with grants, retained rates and other income, so this page deliberately does not claim that a particular pound of council tax pays for a specific service. The total council-tax requirement is retained as context in the download metadata.

## Visualisations

- [Budget composition](https://londongraph.com/g/where-council-tax-goes): Show the service mix in the published London authority budgets.
- [Ordered shares](https://londongraph.com/g/where-council-tax-goes?view=ordered): Put every service on the same share scale.
- [Treemap](https://londongraph.com/g/where-council-tax-goes?view=treemap): Use area to show the relative scale of each service budget.

## Citation guidance

Attribute the original publisher named above and identify LondonGraph as the visualisation and methodology layer. Do not describe live values as a historical census, and do not present placeholder values as observations.