Balance the Draft City Budget

Preparing the annual budget is an essential part of City life. It's a complex process and for the first time, we'd love you, our residents, to get some hands-on experience in balancing the books.

The City's interactive budget tool lets you understand what goes into building our annual budget, and helps the City understand how you'd like to see our annual budget allocated.

How does it work?

Our annual budget has two columns: spending and revenue.

• Spending - where the City spends money to provide essentials like roads, libraries, salaries for City staff and community funding
• Revenue - where the City receives money including rates, fines, interest earned and grants

We ask you to choose to increase or decrease the revenue and spending to reflect the budget you'd like to see delivered.

The most important thing is to try your best to deliver a budget that is ideally balanced or in surplus. You can monitor this via the big line across the top of the budget, which will be green when balanced or in surplus, or red when in deficit.

Up for the challenge?

Visit our budgeting tool below, and get started. You can save your progress and return to it at a later date if need be, but we anticipate the exercise will only take around 15 minutes.

Read our FAQs for some common questions, and if you're interested in reviewing our draft budget planning documents you can peruse those also.

What happens next?

This consultation is open until 30 June 2022. Once it closes, we will compile a report analysing the community's feedback and report back. We will consider this when finalising our annual budget, in conjunction with using sound financial judgment so we can continue to deliver a more prosperous future for our city.