Council Tax Collection Statistics, 2025-26

Council Tax Collection Rates

Source: Council Tax Receipts Return (CTRR). Figures exclude Council Tax Reduction and Water and Sewerage Charges but include any Cost of Living payments used to meet individual Council Tax liabilities. They are before any amounts written off for bad or doubtful debt and reflect any correction to liabilities following billing. Figures for 2025-26 are provisional. The accompanying Excel table indicates which Local Authorities have reported their collection rates on a 'line by line' accounting basis. Note - Comhairle nan Eilean Siar suffered a cyber-attack in 2023. The data presented for the years prior to this are as they were at the time of the attack. There have been further payments received and adjustments made for these historic years. The balance is decreasing and money is being collected. However, due to the attack, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar are unable to attribute these payments to the years they apply to.

Figure 3 shows the Council Tax in-year collection rates - that is, the amount of Council Tax collected by the end of the relevant billing year, as a percentage of billed Council Tax. Over the past twelve years the rate has been fairly stable, normally between 95 and 96 per cent. At 95.2 per cent the collection rate in 2025-26 was a slight decrease from the previous year.

The 2020-21 in-year collection rate (94.8 per cent) was affected by the Covid-19 pandemic as councils suspended debt recovery process and actions to avoid contributing to financial pressure on Council Taxpayers. The higher collection rate (96.2 per cent) in 2022-23 may be due, in part at least, to the £150 Cost of Living payments made by local authorities that year on behalf of the Scottish Government. For most eligible households, these payments were made as a credit to Council Tax accounts. The longer-term trend may in part be due to local authorities’ more efficient and timely collection methods (for example, increasing use of direct debit and other ‘electronic’ methods). The trends described above are illustrated in Figure 4.

Source: Council Tax Receipts Return (CTRR). All figures are net of discounts (e.g. single person discount), exemptions and surcharges. The figures exclude Council Tax Reduction and Water and Sewerage Charges but will include any Cost of Living payments used to meet individual Council Tax liabilities. They are before any amounts written off for bad or doubtful debt and reflect any correction to liabilities following billing. Note - Comhairle nan Eilean Siar suffered a cyber-attack in 2023. The data presented for the years prior to this are as they were at the time of the attack. There have been further payments received and adjustments made for these historic years. The balance is decreasing and money is being collected. However, due to the attack, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar are unable to attribute these payments to the years they apply to.

Figure 5 shows the percentage of Council Tax for specific billing years, received by 31 March 2026. For 2025-26 this is the same as the in-year collection rate but, for other years, this includes late payments collected and adjustments to previous years bills in years after the billing year. For the earlier years, it is unlikely that much more Council Tax will be collected - hence, for these years, the percentages received are converging towards final collection rates. Previous research has indicated that deprivation is linked to non-payment of Council Tax and this is likely to be a factor in variations between local authorities of these near-final collection rates for earlier years.

Source: Council Tax Receipts Return (CTRR). All figures are net of discounts (e.g. single person discount), exemptions and surcharges. The figures exclude Council Tax Reduction and Water and Sewerage Charges but will include any Cost of Living payments used to meet individual Council Tax liabilities. They are before any amounts written off for bad or doubtful debt and reflect any correction to liabilities following billing

Figure 6 (full table in the Excel workbook) gives a further representation of the in-year collection rate over the last decade, from 95.4 per cent for Scotland as a whole in 2014-15 to 96.0 per cent or just under in the years 2015-16 to 2021-22 (with the exception of 2020-21, as a result of the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic). The 2022-23 collection rate was affected as eligible households received £150 Cost of Living payment to reduce their Council Tax liability. The 2025-26 in-year collection rate was 95.2 per cent.

Correspondingly, the percentages of Council Tax being collected after each billing year tends to fall, for example from 1.3 per cent for the 2021-22 billing year to 0.5 per cent for the 2024-25 billing year. This pattern is a direct consequence of two factors – there is less Council Tax still left to collect, and less time has elapsed to collect it in.

Source: Council Tax Receipts Return (CTRR). All figures are net of discounts (e.g. single person discount), exemptions and surcharges. The figures exclude Council Tax Reduction and Water and Sewerage Charges but will include any Cost of Living payments used to meet individual Council Tax liabilities. They are before any amounts written off for bad or doubtful debt and reflect any correction to liabilities following billing.

Figure 7 shows an alternative presentation of in-year and subsequent collection rates. The upper diagonal shows the in-year collection rate for Scotland as a whole and the table should be read by selecting a column and reading downwards. For example, for billing year 2022-23 the in-year collection rate was 96.2 per cent. By the end of the next year (2023-24), the collection rate had risen to 96.7 per cent. It had risen to 97.0 per cent by the end of 2024-25 and it was up to 97.2 in 2025-26. A longer pattern is shown, for the year 2014-15, in Figure 8.

Taking these collection rates together, the overall pattern for Scotland is:

• The in-year collection rate is over 95 per cent, with the exception of 2020-21 when the collection rate dipped below 95 per cent due to being adversely impacted by measures put in place to support Council Taxpayers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
• A further 0.5 per cent or so is collected in the following year.
• ‘Final’ collection rate can reasonably be expected to exceed 97 per cent.