Fees and Charges are either total or partial cost recoveries for certain services. The proportion of costs that can be recovered through fees and charges for any given activity is set out in our Revenue and Financing Policy.

Fees and Charges cover a wide range of our services including swimming pool entry fees, dog registration fees, facility hire, and building consents.

While rates are our main source of income, we also receive around 16% of our revenue from Fees and Charges.

When reviewing Fees and Charges, our general approach is to increase fees by inflation. For the 2025/26 year the inflation figure, as set by BERL (Business and Economic Research Limited), is 3.2%.

In some cases, inflation is not added and fees are kept the same. This may be for a number of reasons including fee increases in the previous year, or to align with fees for other services. In addition, some fees are set by legislation and cannot be changed at our discretion.

For some activities there can be increases above the rate of inflation to better recover the costs of delivering the service, or due to a wider restructure of the way costs are charged to customers.

You can see proposed changes to all categories (e.g. Building, Animal Control, Libraries) in the Statement of Proposal.