Auckland Council has published new rates bills for the coming year - and its take from residents and business has skyrocketed by close to $300 million.
This is despite property values falling an average of 9% across the city between May 2021 and May 2024.
Scroll down to use the Herald map to find - and compare - your new rates bill.
The Council’s online rates information doesn’t include last year’s rates or the change in rates.
Nor does it include the previous capital value for the property - so homeowners can’t easily compare and see the magnitude of their rates rise.
The Herald has provided this information in our map below.
The standard way of calculating rates increases masks the fact that Auckland Council’s rates take is jumping by 9% - considerably more than the official 5.8% residential rates increase, or even the 7.2% figure for commercial rates.
This year the total rates take will be $3.49 billion, an increase of 9% from $3.20b last year. Total residential rates will be about $2.29b, up 8.6% from $2.11b.
Some of the $180m increase in residential rates comes from brand new developments. The figure will change as both rates objections are processed and further new developments are added.
Around 60% of residential properties will see their rates increase by more than the foreshadowed 5.8%. This is because the 5.8% increase is not an average. It is the change in rates for a hypothetical property that had the average value last year and the average value this year. In fact, there are no properties in Auckland with these values. The closest is a property in Wattle Downs now worth $1.29 million which has a 5.5% increase in rates.
A property’s rates depend on its type and location and consist of a set of fixed costs and a portion calculated as a fraction of the current capital value. When property values change, there is no reason to expect that any given property will have a 5.8% increase in rates. A 5.8% for the average valued property does not imply the that overall rates increase will be 5.8%.
Auckland Council manager of financial policy, Andrew Duncan explained council’s process. “We calculate the difference between rates paid in 2024/25 by the average value property (about $1.3m) of $3,846, to the rate paid in 2025/26 by the average value property (about $1.3m) of $4,069 - which is 5.8%.
Most Auckland ratepayers face an increased rates bill even as their property’s value has fallen.
In May, Council agreed to a 5.8% residential rates increase, while in the June release of Council capital values, the average property value dropped by 9%.
Rates are not tied directly to values, rather values are used to distribute rates across the city.
“This gives the best representation of the apples to apples ‘price change’ between years.”
Duncan told the Herald “how a residential property’s CV change compares to other properties in the region will determine whether that property’s rates increase is more, or less, than 5.8 per cent.”
In order to show how changes in rates have varied across the city the Herald has estimated “average-value residential property” rates increase for every suburb in Auckland.
These suburb values do show higher increases in outlying areas. This is partly due to including lifestyle properties which generally saw a larger increase in rates than pure residential properties.
Zoom in to see the new rates bill for your property - and how it compares to your neighbours’.
For each suburb with more than 20 properties, we calculated the current and previous average capital values. Then we used the average rates paid by the properties with values within 5% of these to calculated the suburb’s rates increase.
There are a few differences in this analysis from the Council’s official calculation. Due to data availability, the Herald used land-use categories rather than rating valuation land uses. It also does not factor in the move to rates funded rubbish collection in Rodney and Franklin.
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