Wollongong has more residents per councillor than all but seven NSW councils. Kiama has fewer than the state median

This is not a performance measure and nothing below is a criticism of any council. It is an arithmetic fact about how local representation is distributed, and it is one of the few things about a council that a resident can compare directly against every other council in the state without needing to understand local government finance.

The three councils

Between them the three councils cover 326,633 people and have 31 councillors. Shellharbour and Kiama have the same number of councillors and populations that differ by a factor of three and a half.

What eighth in the state means

The seven councils above Wollongong are Blacktown at 29,256 residents per councillor, Canterbury-Bankstown at 25,683, Liverpool at 25,490, Sydney at 23,728, Central Coast at 23,654, Parramatta at 18,330 and Northern Beaches at 18,051. The Office of Local Government classifies six of those seven as Metropolitan and the Central Coast as Metropolitan Fringe. Wollongong is classified a Regional Town/City, which makes it the highest-ranked regional town or city in the state on this measure, and the only non-metropolitan council in the top eight.

It is barely the highest, though, and the runner-up is worth naming. Lake Macquarie sits at 17,066 residents per councillor against Wollongong's 17,069, a difference of three residents. Behind them come Tweed at 14,256 and Newcastle at 13,605. There are 37 councils in the regional town or city class and the top of it is, in practice, a tie.

At the other end of the state the numbers are of a different order. Brewarrina has 156 residents per councillor, Warren 216, Bourke 235, Bogan 267 and Carrathool 277. Those are councils with a few thousand residents and roughly the same number of councillors as Wollongong's thirteen, which is what produces the spread.

Why the number moves, and what this data does not tell you

The ratio is driven almost entirely by population, not by councils choosing different sizes. Wollongong has 13 councillors and Blacktown 15, at the top of the state; Kiama and Shellharbour have 9 each. The councils at the bottom of the list have 9 to 12. Across all 127, councillor numbers run from 7 to 15, and 9 is much the commonest, held by 60 councils. So the spread from 156 to 29,256 residents each is what happens when councillor numbers move inside a band of eight while populations move across two orders of magnitude.

What we cannot tell you from this workbook is why each council has the number it has. Councillor numbers are a matter for each council under the local government framework and can change, and the dataset records the count without recording the decision behind it. We have not gone looking for the history of each council's determination, and nothing here should be read as saying any council chose wrongly.

One genuine caution about comparing these three. The Office of Local Government sorts councils into groups for performance benchmarking, and Kiama sits in a different group from Wollongong and Shellharbour. That grouping matters a great deal when comparing financial ratios or service costs, and it is why this masthead will not put those side by side without saying so. It does not affect the figures above, because residents per councillor is a raw ratio of two published counts rather than a benchmarked measure.

The other ratio in the same spreadsheet

The workbook also gives full-time equivalent staff, and the resident-per-staff-member ratio does not follow the councillor one. Wollongong has 1,499 staff, or one for every 148 residents. Shellharbour has 439, one for every 186. Kiama has 255, one for every 91. On representation Kiama is the most generously served of the three and Wollongong the least; on staffing Kiama is again the most, but Shellharbour rather than Wollongong is the least. The two ratios are measuring different things and it is worth not conflating them.

What to watch

Whether any of the three changes its councillor numbers, which is the only thing that moves this figure other than population. The next edition of the time series, which will carry 2025-26. And the parts of this workbook nobody has been through: it runs to 124 indicator columns per council, and this story uses five of them.

Sources

1. NSW Office of Local Government, Your Council time series data 2024-25 (xlsx, 206 KB, downloaded and read 25 August 2026): every figure above. Populations for 2024, the number of councillors from the election return, the population-per-councillor and population-per-staff columns, full-time equivalent staff, the council group classifications, and the figures for all 127 councils that reported, from which the ranks, the median of 3,038 and the top and bottom lists are calculated.
2. NSW Office of Local Government, Your Council Report (read 25 August 2026): the index page that publishes the time series workbooks, and confirmation that the 2024-25 file is the current edition.

How we did this

Everything comes from one spreadsheet, downloaded from the Office of Local Government and read directly rather than through the Your Council comparison website. The residents-per-councillor figure is the workbook's own column, and we checked it against the arithmetic: 221,894 divided by 13 is 17,069, 81,566 by 9 is 9,063, and 23,173 by 9 is 2,575. Ranks and the median are ours, computed across the 127 councils in the file that report both a population and a councillor count out of 131 rows; the four excluded are those without both figures. We have rounded residents per councillor to whole people. The population figure is the workbook's Population 2024 column, so these ratios describe 2024-25 and will move as populations do. We have not sought comment from any of the three councils, and no individual councillor is named or discussed anywhere in this piece.