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Council Tax guide

How we spend our budget

We spend around 1.8bn each year across council services. Here is an overview of the budgets across our services and a snapshot of where the money is spent.

Service areas and budget
Services Gross budget 2026/27
Children, Young People and Education £777,122,146
Adult Services and Health £479,563,957
Neighbourhoods £230,374,210
Finance and Resources £42,377,452
Housing Benefit (amount provided by Central Government) £179,592,100
City Development £47,612,316
Strategy and Change £41,025, 304
City Law and Governance £13,839,106
Corporate Management £65,289,421
Total £1,876,796,011

The following figures are a snapshot of how we spend some of the money and does not include all services.

Adult social care: £324m

8,070 clients supported, including:

  • 1,891 residential and nursing care, 
  • 2,528 homecare,
  • 1,937 supported living and
  • 1,232 in receipt of direct payments.

Children's social care: £122m

1,311 looked after children, including:

  • 125 in residential care with average cost of £6,318 per week
  • 340 in independent foster care
  • 509 with Liverpool carers

Homelessness services: £34m

  • 1,700 households in temporary accommodation

School grants: £275m

  • Dedicated school grants for Liverpool maintained schools funding 43,000 school places

High needs funding: £103m

  • High needs funding supporting some of our most vulnerable children to access education and learning.

Early years provision: £75m

  • Funding early years provision to roll out the expanded educational entitlement for 2-year olds and increase rates paid to all providers.

Street cleansing: £15m

  • Cleaning 1,000 kilometres of highways

Waste collection: £13m

  • Collecting waste from 250,000 households (14.4m collections per year)

Street lighting: £1m revenue and £5m capital

  • Maintaining and replacing over 44,000 street lights

Council Tax reduction scheme: £73m

  • Supporting 60,600 residents

Household support fund: £12m

Support to economically vulnerable residents, for example:

  • 23,000 households provided with supermarket vouchers for families with children in receipt of free school meals
  • £2m help with energy costs for people of pensionable age and those living with a disability
  • £1.2m was also distributed by Feeding Liverpool to community food groups across the city

Citizen support scheme: £3m

  • Supporting people in crisis with food and necessities and household essentials