QLDC debt heads towards $50,000 per household

As submission hearings open today on the Queenstown Lakes District Council’s Long Term Plan Crux has been analysing how the council’s planned debt compares to the rest of New Zealand, and at $50,000 per household ($1 billion total and 20,000 households) by 2030 it looks to be a record breaker.

Comparing different council’s debt levels is not an exact science but here’s what we have discovered using a number of different council’s proposed long term plans (LTPs).

For simplicity we've excluded commercial rates from our calculations as these rates differ dramatically between locations (in Wellington the average commercial property pays $32,000 a year) and it's not clear how commercial targeted rates are treated in the LTP documents. 

We have looked at the QLDC's LTP compared to those of Wellington, Auckland, Central Otago and Whanganui. In each case we’ve compared current and planned debt against the number of households or rating units.

In the case of the QLDC the proposed plan is to take debt from the current level of $640 million to $1 billion by 2030. Allowing for some revenue shortfalls, but a balancing increase in ratepayers, we’ve left the population numbers at 2025 levels in these ballpark figures. The Queenstown Lakes population is approximately 48,000.

In the QLDC that means current debt per household is $32,000 rising to $50,000 by 2030.

By comparison, Whanganui, with a similar population to QLDC’s of 19,875 households (48,400 people) has current debt of $160 million and projected 2030 debt of $278 million – taking it from debt per household of $8,050 to to $13,987.

At the Wellington City Council, with their 81,000 households (population 217,000) debt currently sits at $1.8 billion or $22,222 per household. By 2030 debt is forecast to rise to $2.5 billion or $30,864 per household.

The Auckland Council has just more than $14 billion of debt, covered by 545,127 households (population 1.7 million people). That’s currently $25,787 per household. It forecasts 2030 debt as $20.7 billion, equating to $38,048 per household.

At the opposite end of the scale to the QLDC is neighbouring Central Otago District Council (CODC), with current debt per household that is estimated by the Ratepayers’ Report at only 34 cents per household. 

The CODC is not yet publishing its own LTP debt forecasts, but the council has told Crux today that their 2024/25 debt is $88.5 million (up from $35 million just a year ago) serviced by 11,382 households or a population of 24,000. That means the current CODC debt per household is $7,779.