Long-Term Plan Ka hua. Ka puaawai. Ka ora.

The city's budgets, plans and rates for the next 10 years are now set. 

Read the 2024-34 Long-Term Plan

Read the 2024-54 Infrastructure Strategy

What's in our Long-Term Plan

This Long-Term Plan document outlines our plans, budgets and priorities for the next decade, with a focus on the next three years.

Across New Zealand, councils, households and businesses are facing hugely challenging financial circumstances, with inflation, interest costs and depreciation making everything we do more expensive.

Finding the right balance

This Plan is aimed at finding the right balance between continuing to maintain our city by delivering the essential work that our community values and relies on, while meeting everyday costs with everyday revenue within three years, and keeping rates increases as low as possible in the circumstances.

The Plan is based on the needs of current and future Hamiltonians. During the consultation period, Council received almost 3000 submissions from individuals, organisations and businesses. Significant changes were made in the final Plan as a result of this feedback. Read about what we consulted on here.

We found a lot of savings by reducing our staff costs and making cuts to our capital programme.

But residents will continue receiving what Council currently provides — such as keeping library and pool opening hours, gardens maintained, the city tidy, and the current kerbside residential rubbish and recycling collection schedule.

What will our rates be?

To achieve this, the Plan includes an average general rates increase of 16.5% in 2024/25 ($9 a week for a median-value residential property). The rates increase will reduce by about one percentage point annually over the following four years (15.5%, 14.6%, 13.5%, 12.5%).

We recognise this is a significant increase in rates over the next few years, and that many in our community will find this challenging. However, options to further reduce rates at this time are constrained because of the increased costs we face and the growing requirements on councils from central government.

Every effort was made to keep the increases as low as possible given the financial environment, and no decision was made lightly.

In 2020 we asked residents what they love about Hamilton Kirikiriroa, and what would make their city an even better place to be.

Public opinion factored strongly into the development of Council’s five priorities:

2024-34 Long-Term Plan submissions

2021-31 Long-Term Plan submissions