An independent tool tracking the spending, staffing, and structure of federal and state Australian government agencies — sourced from Parliament’s own budget papers and the APSC, presented without the jargon. Free to access, forever.
Budget Papers is an independent civic-awareness tool tracking the spending, staffing, and structure of federal and state Australian government agencies. Built with AI assistance — errors are possible and can be reported at hello@budgetpapers.com. It will be free to access, forever.
Use the Budget Expenditure tab to browse Commonwealth portfolios and agencies — see departmental vs administered spending, compare across years, zoom in on individual entities, and inspect each agency’s staffing. Switch between jurisdictions to compare Commonwealth, NSW, Victoria, Queensland, and other states. The Organisational Chart tab maps the hierarchy of Commonwealth agencies within their portfolios, with workforce composition shown on each card. The Compare tab puts two to four agencies side by side.
Commonwealth figures cover four years, 2023–24 through 2026–27, sourced from Budget Paper No. 4. All eight states and territories are included for 2024–25 and 2025–26, taken straight from each jurisdiction’s own budget papers. All figures are in Australian dollars. The How Budgets Work page explains what these numbers do and don’t include, and the quirks behind them. You can download the whole dataset — raw and annotated, as CSV, Excel or JSON — from the Data page.
Workforce figures cover three metrics for each Commonwealth agency: Average Staffing Level (ASL) from Budget Paper No. 4, classification breakdowns (APS 1–6, Executive Level, and Senior Executive Service) from Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) employment data, and contractor-to-APS conversion figures by portfolio. Non-APS bodies such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Special Broadcasting Service, Reserve Bank of Australia, and Australia Post sit outside the Australian Public Service Commission dataset and link to their annual reports instead.
State entries use a single combined total per agency rather than the Commonwealth’s departmental/administered split, and cover a curated subset of each jurisdiction’s largest agencies. You can still line a state agency up against a federal one in the Compare tab — just with less detail on the state side. The How Budgets Work page covers where the two datasets differ.