Your council tax is up 17.7% in two years. Your councils have trebled the number of staff on six figures.

Note 1

Three times as many six-figure salaries

In 2019/20, 170 people working for a Scottish council were paid more than £100,000. Last year 510 were. That is the chart below, going almost straight up. Drop the line to £50,000 and the count runs from 11,564 to 28,426 over the same five years.

The 28 councils whose 2024/25 accounts were audited in time, so that the four late audits do not read as a fall

The same count at £50,000

Basis The statutory pay-band disclosure, in £5,000 bands, covering every employee. Both charts count staff above a fixed cash threshold, exactly as the accounts do, so inflation is doing some of the work: £100,000 in 2019/20 money is £124,212 today, and counting above that restated line instead gives 170 then against 115 now. Those real-terms counts are in the JSON for every council and every year, along with the same test run on the median Scottish wage. The 2023/24 spike is the backdated 2022/23 teachers’ pay award, paid in April 2023, and the accounts say so themselves.

Note 2

The goodbyes

Scotland’s councils spent £224m on 4,897 gold plated exit packages between 2019/20 and 2024/25, which is £37.4m a year, every year, to pay people to stop working there. 675 of them were worth more than £100,000 each, and between them those 675 took half the money.

Total cost of exit packages, all 32 councils, per year

Basis Every council discloses its exit packages by cost band in its audited accounts. For most of them the cost covers pension strain and added years as well as the money paid to the person leaving, and each council’s page carries the wording it used that year. The bands name nobody, and neither does this record.

Note 3

The pay you won’t find in the council’s accounts

Councils moved leisure centres, museums, buses and property into companies and trusts that they own. The people running those bodies are paid outside the council’s own remuneration report, where the register does not reach. The best paid of them earns more than any council chief executive in Scotland.

£460,445went to the best-paid director of Edinburgh Trams Ltd, a company owned by City of Edinburgh Council. The middle-ranking Scottish council chief executive was paid £166,528 in 2024/25.

Basis 23 bodies across 15 councils so far, read from the companies’ and charities’ own filed accounts. Many of them disclose a pay band and no name. Where no document gives the name, this record leaves it blank instead of inferring one.

Note 4

One salary, 118 households

The middle-ranking Scottish chief executive was paid £166,528 in 2024/25. At the middle Band D bill of £1,416, the whole year’s council tax from this many households goes on that one salary:

118

Basis The median of the 32 councils’ chief-executive salaries, and the median of their Band D charges in the same year, excluding water and sewerage. Your own council’s figure is on its page.

Note 5

Officers and members

267 senior officers were paid £28.8m in salary in 2024/25. In the same year the 665 elected councillors, the ones you can actually vote out, cost £28.4m between them.

Basis The officers’ figure is salary as disclosed, before employer pension contributions, so it understates what they cost. The councillors’ figure is the total printed in each council’s remuneration report, which for most of them includes expenses and for a few includes employer costs, noted council by council. It covers the 28 councils with audited 2024/25 accounts.

The register

Find your council

“Households” counts the Band D households whose entire annual council tax it takes to pay that chief executive’s salary. Pension totals leave out 3 officers whose contribution the accounts did not disclose. Four councils stop at 2023/24 because their 2024/25 audits were not finished: Clackmannanshire, East Dunbartonshire, Stirling and West Dunbartonshire.