Municipal Finance Dashboard

Data source and bases

National Treasury Municipal Money API (municipaldata.treasury.gov.za), mSCOA-era cubes, covering South Africa's 8 metropolitan municipalities, in nominal Rands. A financial year runs to 30 June: FY 2023-24 is the year ended 30 June 2024. Each figure is the first of the cube's audited actual (AUDA), pre-audit actual (PAUD) or in-year actual (ACT, the sum of the monthly section-71 returns) that exists for that year, and the one used is stated beside it. Where the API returns no usable figures for a metro, the card says so — a missing value is never shown as R0.

Operating balance is operating revenue less operating expenditure before capital transfers — the cube's own 'Surplus/(Deficit)' line (item 4500). It is an accrual operating result: not a cash shortfall, and not a budget deficit in the fiscal sense, since capital grants (item 4600) and capital spending sit outside both figures.

• Operating revenue: Municipal Money incexp_v2, line items 0300–2800 summed; equals the cube's 'Total Revenue (excluding capital transfers and contributions)' subtotal (item 2900).
• Operating expenditure: Municipal Money incexp_v2, line items 3000–4300 summed; equals the cube's 'Total Expenditure' subtotal (item 4400).
• Capital expenditure: Municipal Money capital_v2, all asset classes, capital_type NEW, RENEWAL and UPGRADING only (depreciation and repairs & maintenance excluded).
• Cash and cash equivalents: Municipal Money financial_position_v2, item 0120 only — year-end position; receivables (item 0130) excluded.

A capital-expenditure figure larger than the same year's operating expenditure is withheld rather than shown. Municipal Money publishes a capital-expenditure figure for this year larger than the same year's operating expenditure, which no metro does. The upstream cell is an asset-register or unit error, so the figure is withheld rather than shown; revenue, expenditure and cash for the year are unaffected. Five metro-years meet that test as at 7 September 2026 — eThekwini 2024-25 and Nelson Mandela Bay 2019-20 to 2022-23; the traced cells are in docs/MUNICIPAL_FINANCE_BASES.md.

Before 30 August 2026 this page showed “total revenue” and “total expenditure” series summed from item ranges that belonged to a different cube; the expenditure series was in fact the total-revenue subtotal plus double-counted revenue lines. Those series are withdrawn and are not rendered anywhere on this page. Method and API calls: docs/MUNICIPAL_FINANCE_BASES.md in the repository.