Open Hastings / Council spending
Council spending
What Hastings Borough Council pays out, from the payments it publishes itself: every payment over £250, month by month, since January 2018. £45m left the council's accounts in the twelve months to July 2026.
Read the figures as a floor, and as payments rather than spending. Payments under £250 are not published. Of the 12-month figure, £2.8m is money passing through rather than services bought — refunds of council tax and business rates, refunded income, and holding-account transfers — and is shown here but kept out of the supplier rankings. A payment says money left; what it bought, and whether that was good value, is not something this data can tell you.
In the same 12 months the council withheld the payee's name on 370 lines worth £50.9k — individuals, mostly, under its own publication rules. Those lines are counted above and never guessed at.
Month by month
Payments by the date the council made them, the latest month in terracotta. A spike is usually a capital payment — a vehicle fleet, a building — rather than a change in running costs.
Every month as a figure
| Aug 23 | £2.8m |
|---|---|
| Sep 23 | £2.7m |
| Oct 23 | £2.8m |
| Nov 23 | £2.9m |
| Dec 23 | £2.6m |
| Jan 24 | £2.8m |
| Feb 24 | £3.1m |
| Mar 24 | £3.5m |
| Apr 24 | £3.0m |
| May 24 | £3.3m |
| Jun 24 | £3.1m |
| Jul 24 | £3.2m |
| Aug 24 | £3.1m |
| Sep 24 | £2.4m |
| Oct 24 | £2.9m |
| Nov 24 | £2.8m |
| Dec 24 | £3.5m |
| Jan 25 | £3.3m |
| Feb 25 | £4.4m |
| Mar 25 | £4.0m |
| Apr 25 | £3.7m |
| May 25 | £4.4m |
| Jun 25 | £3.7m |
| Jul 25 | £3.8m |
| Aug 25 | £3.8m |
| Sep 25 | £4.0m |
| Oct 25 | £3.6m |
| Nov 25 | £3.1m |
| Dec 25 | £2.9m |
| Jan 26 | £3.0m |
| Feb 26 | £3.1m |
| Mar 26 | £4.8m |
| Apr 26 | £4.2m |
| May 26 | £3.3m |
| Jun 26 | £5.9m |
| Jul 26 | £3.7m |
Year by year
By financial year (April to March). The current year is drawn lighter because it is not finished.
Every financial year as a figure
| 2017/18 | £5.8m |
|---|---|
| 2018/19 | £20m |
| 2019/20 | £20m |
| 2020/21 | £22m |
| 2021/22 | £25m |
| 2022/23 | £33m |
| 2023/24 | £36m |
| 2024/25 | £39m |
| 2025/26 | £44m |
| 2026/27 | £17m |
What kind of money
The council's own accounting categories for the twelve months to July 2026. 'Capital' is buildings, vehicles and grants for works; 'Third Party' is services bought from other bodies; 'Collection Fund' is council tax and business-rate refunds going back out.
Where it went
The fifteen service areas that received most, as the council names them, in the same twelve months. Refunds and holding accounts are left out here.
Who was paid
The twenty suppliers paid most in the twelve months to July 2026. Names are as the council wrote them. Each links to everything the record holds on that supplier — 1,049 suppliers have a page; the rest are in the dataset.
Search for a supplier →The council's files
Every figure here comes from 99 monthly files published on hastings.gov.uk. The latest three:
All payment lines as a dataset →- July 2026 ↗
the council's own file
955 lines - June 2026 ↗
the council's own file
871 lines - May 2026 ↗
the council's own file
771 lines
How this page is made, and what it cannot see
The council publishes a CSV of every payment over £250 each month under the Local Government Transparency Code. We download each file, read its lines, and check our total against the total printed at the bottom of the council's own file. A month whose sum disagrees is still shown, and the disagreement is recorded on the data health page.
Payments are dated by the transaction date on each line, so a file published in February can carry January's payments. Where the council linked the same file from two months, it is counted once.
The per-resident figure divides the 12-month total by the ONS mid-year population estimate for the borough (90,855 — ONS mid-2025 population estimate for Hastings borough (Nomis NM_2002_1)). It is a way to feel the size of the number, not a measure of what any resident received.
Not visible here: what the council receives (council tax, business rates, grants from government, fees), its budget, or its debt. Those are in the council's statements of accounts. A supplier's name is not a judgement: a large figure usually means a large contract, decided elsewhere on this record.