This isn't a league table. Braddan and Santon are thirteen times apart in rate income — ranking them against each other tells you about scale, not performance. What's more useful is grouping authorities with genuinely similar ones, being honest about where collaboration already exists versus where it's only plausible, and letting you build your own comparison rather than accepting the one baked into a table.
| Authority | Tier | Basis | Rate income | Rate in £ | Result for year | Borrowing | Net assets | Own accounts? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Douglas | Town | outturn 24-25¶ | £15,382,000 | 573p | −£4,445,000 | £90,963,000 | £289,885,000 | no |
| Ramsey | Town | outturn 22-23§ | £3,130,602 | 445p | +£614,176 | £30,313,288 | £68,257,705 | no |
| Onchan | District | outturn 23-24¶ | £2,792,463 | 373p | −£377,447 | £15,081,307 | £66,223,100 | no |
| Peel | Town | outturn 23-24 | £1,661,273‡ | 267p | +£524,009 | £10,806,253 | £49,546,410 | no |
| Braddan | Parish | estimate 23-24 | £1,443,032 | 257p | — | £18.1m† | £15.11m† | yes |
| Castletown | Town | outturn 23-24 (draft) | £1,231,242 | 356p | +£174,880 | £10,384,205 | £32,801,341 | yes |
| Port Erin | Village | outturn 24-25 | £1,116,967 | 378p | +£351,783 | £5,211,515 | £30,010,664 | no |
| Garff | Parish | outturn 24-25 | £1,012,627‡ | 191.5p | +£92,829 | £984,935 | £4,046,253 | no |
| Malew | Parish | outturn 23-24 | £787,588 | 199p | +£63,158 | £263,423 | £3,746,363 | no |
| Port St Mary | Village | outturn 23-24 | £532,169 | 386p | −£124,936 | £4,489,130 | £17,226,706 | no |
| Arbory & Rushen | Parish | outturn 23-24 | £517,635 | 162p | +£42,885 | £28,450 | £1,075,678 | no |
| Marown | Parish | outturn 23-24 | £322,316 | 181p | −£20,469 | none | £158,326 | 2019 only |
| German | Parish | outturn 23-24 | £269,620‡ | 94p | +£27,461 | none | £443,213 | no |
| Michael | District | outturn 22-23§ | £266,991‡ | 144p | +£21,321 | none | £569,174 | no |
| Patrick | Parish | outturn 23-24 | £204,253 | 221p | +£19,422 | none | £76,551 | no |
| Lezayre | Parish | outturn 22-23§ | £199,426‡ | 97p | −£5,734 | none | £795,610 | no |
| Ballaugh | Parish | outturn 23-24 | £167,006‡ | 125p | −£38,421 | none | £141,874 | no |
| Andreas | Parish | outturn 23-24 | £136,131 | 134p | −£13,532 | none | £670,505 | no |
| Bride | Parish | outturn 24-25 | £116,730 | 70p | +£6,952 | none | £173,146 | no |
| Santon | Parish | outturn 23-24 | £110,912 | 155p | +£3,491 | none | £126,529 | no |
| Jurby | Parish | outturn 23-24 | £84,459 | 149p | −£6,710 | none | £452,343 | no |
†Braddan's borrowing and net assets are at 31 March 2025, not the 2023-24 row this is otherwise built on; it's on an estimates basis, so has no outturn "result for the year" here. Port Erin's, Bride's, Garff's and Douglas's are each authority's most recent year (24-25); most others are year ended 31 March 2024, except Castletown's 2023-24 (still in draft), and Ramsey's/Lezayre's/Michael's 2022-23. ‡German, Lezayre, Ballaugh, Garff, Peel and Michael run separate general and refuse rate funds; the figure shown combines both, because that's the headline each page itself uses — every other authority's "rate income" here is its general rate fund alone. §Ramsey, Lezayre and Michael each show their most recent verified year, not 2023-24 like most of the table, because a second source PDF was either missing from the archive (Ramsey, Lezayre) or corrupted (Michael). ¶Douglas's and Onchan's rows are General Fund (rate-funded services) only — each runs a Housing Revenue Account self-funded by rents, excluded here exactly as Braddan's housing account is; "Result for the year" for both is the published "Net deficit/(deficit) on provision of services", not the statutory total (which is dominated by non-cash fixed-asset revaluation and pension remeasurement). See each authority's own page and the consolidated accounts page for the full picture.
Look at borrowing and the pattern is stark: every Village and Town authority here carries millions; every Parish authority carries thousands or none. That's the real dividing line — villages and towns own harbours, halls, promenades and housing stock that sit on their balance sheets; parishes generally don't. Rate income tells a messier story: Port St Mary's rate income is smaller than Malew's despite being a Village against a Parish, and Braddan (officially a Parish) out-earns every Town except Castletown. Scale and official tier don't always move together — which is exactly why the comparison tool below lets you check any combination yourself rather than trust a single ranking.
The Northern and Western clusters group by shared-service board membership, not by budget size — Ramsey (£3.13m) and Jurby (£84k) sit in the same Northern cluster despite being close to forty times apart in rate income, because Ramsey is the one administering the shared site rather than just paying into it. That's a genuinely different — and arguably more useful — way to group authorities than sorting them by scale. Douglas, Garff and Michael each sit outside the tidy groupings on this page for different reasons — one by sheer scale, one by being the sole leveraged Parish, one by touching two clusters at once — which is itself worth noting rather than forcing them into a cluster that doesn't fit.
| Metric |
|---|
All 21 Isle of Man local authorities (the 2020 Arbory–Rushen merger and the 2016 Laxey/Lonan/Maughold merger into Garff take the historical count down to 21 overall), grouped by official tier. All 21 are now built — see the consolidated accounts page for the island-wide totals.
Every one of the 21 already pays into at least one shared regional facility. Three don't just pay in — they host: Douglas administers the Eastern District Civic Amenity Site, Ramsey the Northern District Civic Amenity Joint Committee, and Peel the Western Civic Amenity Site and swimming pool. The strongest evidence on this site is now a genuinely mutual confirmation: Onchan's own accounts independently name Douglas and the Eastern site, and give the exact sum paid — the first joint-board finding here confirmed from both the host's side and a payer's own published wording, not just one or the other. Michael is the outlier in a different way: the only authority confirmed touching two clusters at once, Western for civic amenity, swimming and housing, Northern for refuse.
Port St Mary's page doesn't carry a separately-itemised swimming pool or civic amenity line — its underlying detailed schedule had a genuine gap (documented on its page), so its contribution, if any, is folded into a higher-level total rather than missing. Whether Malew's and Arbory & Rushen's civic amenity contributions go to the Western Civic Amenity Site Board or a different one still isn't established. Lezayre and German pay into functionally identical services but don't use the word "Northern"/"Western" in their own accounts, so those two rows are geographic inference, not a confirmed name match — flagged accordingly. The Eastern District Civic Amenity Site figures for Braddan, Santon and Garff, and Onchan's own confirming figure, are each drawn from that authority's own accounts — genuinely independent confirmations rather than a name match between two separate documents.
Braddan and Castletown are the only two that publish their own accounts where a resident can find them without going through Tynwald — and Castletown's own site goes back to 2010/11, the deepest self-published record of any authority here. Marown's own site has one set, from 2019. None of the other eighteen, including the four newest additions (Ramsey, Peel, Onchan, Michael), publish independently — their figures are public only because the Department lays every local authority's accounts before Tynwald each year, and the Tynwald report's own foreword says a large number of those arrived late for the 2026 deadline. Scale doesn't predict this: Ramsey has the largest balance sheet of any Town Commission here bar Douglas and still doesn't publish its own accounts, and neither Ramsey's nor Michael's second year's source PDF was even available in the archive — Ramsey's most recent published year here is 2022-23, Michael's 2022-23 (a 2023-24 PDF exists for Michael but is corrupted beyond recovery).
What this page is not. It doesn't attempt a cost-per-resident or cost-per-household comparison. An earlier pass at that showed it mixes domestic and non-domestic ratepayers in ways that overstate the picture for authorities with a bigger commercial base, and no published source gives a clean per-property breakdown to fix it. Rate-in-the-pound is the safer comparison and is used above instead.
All 21 are built, so the next steps shift from coverage to depth. First, the consolidated accounts page now gives the island-wide totals this page's per-authority rows can't — total rate income, borrowing and net assets, and what share of each is Douglas alone. Second, a genuine cost-per-service comparison (refuse per tonne, not per resident) would sidestep the domestic/non-domestic rate problem entirely, because service volumes are measurable independent of who's on the rate roll — the joint-board network above, now with three confirmed hosts and one two-cluster authority, is exactly the shared-cost data that comparison would need. Third, revisiting Ramsey and Michael once (if) their missing or corrupted second-year PDFs surface would bring both fully onto the same 2023-24 basis as the rest of the site.