One NT council raised rates 37% this year. The rest averaged 6%.

The Northern Territory is the only Australian jurisdiction that has councils and no central comparison of what they charge. The ACT has no comparison either, for the simpler reason that it has no councils — the territory government rates properties directly.

Every state collects the figures centrally in some form, though the forms vary more than you would expect: an annual performance return in Victoria, a spreadsheet in Queensland, a report inside a PDF in South Australia. In the NT, each council publishes its own Declaration of Rates and Charges as a PDF on its own website, in its own format, and nobody collates them.

So we did. Below is what every NT council charges a residential property in 2026-27, read from the declaration each council passed at its own June meeting.

Wagait Shire raised rates 37% in one year

Wagait is a small shire across the harbour from Darwin. Its 2026-27 declaration sets the rate at $1,015.87 per allotment, up from $741.51, and the council puts the size of it in the declaration itself: "This is an increase of 37% from the rates amount agreed in 2025-26."

The Annual Shire Plan explains why. Years of small increases, it says, "have not kept pace with the rising costs associated with delivering essential services", and grant funding has become harder to get. The plan is blunt about what that leaves: "Council has reached a point where a more significant adjustment to rates is necessary to place the organisation back on a financially sustainable path."

The other councils in the table below increased rates by an average of about 6%, in a range from 3.0% to 10.6%. That average covers the 15 councils with comparable 2025-26 and 2026-27 residential figures — every council in the table except Wagait itself. Katherine and Belyuen are not in it, for the reasons set out under the table.

What each NT council charges in 2026-27

General rates only. Garbage, recycling and waste charges are excluded throughout, because councils bundle them differently and including them would compare different things.

Council	2026-27	2025-26	Change
Groote Archipelago	$3,391	$3,083	+10.0%
East Arnhem	$3,294	$3,106	+6.1%
Tiwi Islands	$2,970	$2,700	+10.0%
Central Desert	$2,391	$2,322	+3.0%
West Daly	$2,195	$2,070	+6.0%
Alice Springs	$2,106	$2,022	+4.2%
Darwin	$1,870	$1,773	+5.5%
Palmerston	$1,608	$1,533	+4.9%
Roper Gulf	$1,569	$1,494	+5.0%
Barkly	$1,475	$1,411	+4.5%
Victoria Daly	$1,399	$1,332	+5.0%
MacDonnell	$1,387	$1,254	+10.6%
West Arnhem	$1,233	$1,121	+10.0%
Litchfield	$1,153	$1,109	+4.0%
Coomalie	$1,132	$1,088	+4.0%
Wagait	$1,016	$742	+37.0%

Two councils are missing from the table, and from the average above. Katherine published its 2026-27 rates, but the Valuer-General revalued Katherine land downward at the same time, so the rate in the dollar rose 14.8% while the council reports an average increase of 4.5% to ratepayers. Both numbers are true, and publishing the first as if it were a rates rise would mislead, so we still show Katherine's 2025-26 figure, about $2,781 on a $150,000 unimproved value. Belyuen has not published a declaration since 2021-22.

The dearest council charges more than three times the cheapest

Groote Archipelago charges $3,391 and Wagait $1,016: more than three times as much, in the same Territory. Darwin, the capital, sits in the middle at $1,870.

The cause is not extravagance. Remote councils collect rates from very few rateable properties across enormous areas, and much of the land is Aboriginal freehold that is conditionally rateable or not rateable at all. Central Desert's own declaration notes that rates make up "just 4.7% of Council's total income". When the rate base is that small, the per-property charge has to be large, and it still funds very little.

It also explains why so many remote councils charge a flat amount per allotment rather than a percentage of land value. Where property values are low or unassessed, a percentage raises almost nothing, so the minimum charge becomes the actual bill for nearly every household.

Darwin and Palmerston, where most Territorians live

For Darwin, Palmerston and the rural council between them:

• Darwin charges 0.62347% of a property's unimproved value, with a minimum of $1,464. On a typical $300,000 unimproved value that is about $1,870, up 5.5%. The council quotes the rise as "$104.99 per year or $2.02 per week for an average single dwelling property".
• Palmerston charges 0.643173% with a $1,530.66 minimum, about $1,608 on a $250,000 unimproved value. Its Municipal Plan describes a "4.9% increase to the RID for Residential and Residential Marlow Lagoon properties".
• Litchfield, the rural municipality between them, charges a flat $1,153.17 — the lowest of the three, and up 4.0%, which the council puts at "an increase of only $0.85 per week for residential properties".

Any figure computed from a typical land value is an estimate, not a bill. Your own rates notice depends on your property's unimproved value, which the Valuer-General sets.

How we did this

Every figure above was read from the council's own Declaration of Rates and Charges, or from the rate schedule inside its Municipal or Regional Plan. We did not take any figure from a news report or a council media release.

Two checks kept us honest:

1. Reproduce last year before trusting this year. For each council we first re-read the 2025-26 figure from the 2025-26 declaration and confirmed it matched what we already held. Only then did we read the new one. Where that check could not be run, the council was not updated.
2. Compare against what the council said it did. Where a council states its own increase, we check our arithmetic against it and refuse the figure if the two disagree by more than two percentage points. That is what caught Katherine.

Tiwi Islands publishes its declaration only as a photograph of a newspaper notice, with no machine-readable text. We read it at full resolution and cross-checked: the residential figure appears four times in the notice, and every other charge on it also rose exactly 10.0%, which a misread digit would not do.

This exercise also corrected an error of our own. We had been showing West Daly's commercial charge as if it were residential, overstating that council's rates by 11%. It is fixed, and the correct figure is in the table above.

What this does not tell you

Rates are not comparable the way a grocery price is. Councils differ in what the general rate buys — some fund waste collection from it, others charge separately — and in whether they charge a flat amount or a percentage of land value. Two councils with the same headline figure can deliver very different services for it.

What the table does show reliably is direction and scale: who raised rates this year, by how much, and how far apart the Territory's councils sit. For 2026-27, the answer is that one small shire made a correction it had put off for years, and everyone else moved with costs.