Spending data is held for 171 of England's 317 principal councils

The list of bodies comes from a source registry of 871 English public bodies, of which 317 are principal councils. Combined authorities, fire authorities, police bodies, national parks and waste authorities are counted separately and never added to a council total.

Periods held and missing periods are read from the processed data itself, not from any claim about it. A missing period is one that falls between the first and last period held for that body, so a council that simply started publishing late is not counted as having a gap. "Not found" against a council's own page means a spending page has not been verified for it, not that the council fails to publish one.

Transaction counts are deliberately not shown as a total here. Some councils' files load duplicate rows, so any estate-wide sum is currently an upper bound rather than a measured figure. Published spending data covers payments over each body's threshold and is not the whole of its budget.

Source: council transparency pages and the processing log, 2026-09-04. Full methodology and corrections log.