Reading the numbers
in context.

This is the most important distinction in Commonwealth budget reporting, and most figures on this site depend on it. Departmental expenses are the costs an agency incurs in running itself: salaries, accommodation, IT and other operating costs. Administered expenses are funds an agency manages on behalf of the government, under rules it does not set: welfare payments, Medicare benefits and grants to other organisations. These funds pass through the agency’s accounts, but the agency does not decide where they go.¹

For example, Services Australia’s departmental funding pays the staff who assess a family’s eligibility for childcare assistance; the payment the family then receives is administered funding.¹ Across the budget as a whole, administered spending is typically six to seven times larger than departmental spending. The Department of Social Services’ total of around $157 billion, for instance, consists almost entirely of payments such as JobSeeker, the Age Pension and Family Tax Benefit. The department’s own operating costs amount to a few hundred million dollars, a small fraction of the headline figure.

A special account is a legislated allocation of funds reserved for a specific purpose. It is established either by a determination of the Finance Minister or by its own Act of Parliament.² Special accounts are not bank accounts, and they sit outside the departmental and administered categories, forming a third, separate classification.

They are typically used for cost-recovered services, for funds that must carry over from one financial year to the next rather than lapse on 30 June, and for programs that operate more like a trust than an ordinary budget line. Budget Paper No. 4 reports them separately because combining them with departmental or administered totals would either double-count funds or obscure their purpose.² For the same reason, some small self-funded agencies appear smaller than they are when only their departmental and administered figures are shown, as much of their operating budget is held in a special account.

Some Commonwealth entities are not structured as conventional government departments. Government Business Enterprises (GBEs) are businesses owned by the government but expected to operate commercially, price their services appropriately and return a profit, as a private company would. There are currently ten.³

Australia Post is the clearest example. Its total expenses cover the full cost of operating a national postal and parcel network, including staff, vehicles and processing centres, and are funded almost entirely by postage and freight revenue rather than by taxpayers. The only government-funded component is the Community Service Obligation, which covers services Australia Post would not otherwise provide on a commercial basis, such as delivering letters to remote properties at the same price as to a city address. That payment is typically between $50 and $100 million, which is small relative to total expenses of around $8.4 billion.³ A GBE’s total expenses on this site should therefore be read as a measure of the size of the business, not of its cost to taxpayers.

The Australian Office of Financial Management manages the Commonwealth’s debt. It raises funds for the government by issuing Treasury Bonds and Treasury Notes, manages the government’s day-to-day cash position and supports the orderly functioning of the bond market. It does not deliver services or administer programs.⁴

Its reported expenses therefore consist largely of debt issuance, refinancing and cash management, rather than government spending in the conventional sense. Because Commonwealth debt runs to hundreds of billions of dollars, the Australian Office of Financial Management’s figure, which exceeds $700 billion in some years, is far larger than that of any agency that delivers programs.⁵ For this reason Budget Papers excludes it from the default view; including it would distort every other comparison on the site.

A large share of Treasury’s administered expenses is not spending by the department but GST revenue passed on to the states. Under the Federal Financial Relations Act 2009, the Commonwealth collects the GST and distributes it among the states according to the principle of horizontal fiscal equalisation. The aim is that a smaller state with a narrower tax base, such as Tasmania, can provide a standard of services comparable to that of a larger state such as New South Wales.⁶ Treasury administers the payment but has no say in how each state spends it.

These payments typically total between $120 and $160 billion a year. If included by default, they would make Treasury appear to be the largest-spending department in the country, when it is in fact transferring the funds to the states. Budget Papers therefore excludes them from the default view, together with the Australian Office of Financial Management.

Each year in the dataset carries one of three stage labels, which indicate how settled the figure is. A Budget Estimate is the forecast for the coming year, published on budget night before any of it has been spent. An Estimated Actual is the current year, revised at the following budget once most of the year has elapsed, and is therefore considerably closer to the final outcome. A Historical figure relates to a year that is closed and audited.⁷

Labels change once a year, when a new budget is released, rather than on a fixed calendar date. This is deliberate: a figure should not be presented as more reliable simply because 1 July has passed. It moves to the next stage only when a new budget paper revises it.

In most cases the cause is not a change in policy but a machinery-of-government change: a department is renamed, restructured or merged, and responsibility for a large block of administered spending moves with it.

For example, the federal health department’s budget in this dataset rose by around 80 per cent in a single year. This did not reflect a near-doubling of health spending; the department had taken on aged care and disability programs previously managed by other agencies, so the funding moved between departments rather than grew.⁷ As a general guide, a year-on-year change of more than about 30 per cent in a department’s budget warrants checking for a restructure before it is read as a change in funding.

There are two common reasons. An agency may have been absorbed into its parent department’s appropriation and is no longer reported separately; its funding continues but is no longer itemised. Alternatively, the figure for that year may not yet have been published for that jurisdiction.

In either case, a missing year reflects a gap in the published record. Budget Papers does not estimate or extrapolate figures to fill it.

The states and territories do not report their budgets on that basis. The Commonwealth’s departmental/administered split is possible because Budget Paper No. 4 applies it consistently to every federal entity in a single set of tables. Each state and territory publishes its own budget papers, in its own format and on its own timetable, and the definition of an “agency” varies between jurisdictions.

New South Wales, for example, uses a cluster model in which several agencies share a single combined budget under one department: NSW Ambulance sits within the broader NSW Health cluster rather than having a separate line. Queensland groups its agencies differently, and Western Australia reports by service-delivery agency.⁸ Because none of the eight states and territories consistently separates an agency’s operating costs from the payments it administers, every state and territory entry on this site is shown as a single combined total. This reflects a genuine difference in how the jurisdictions keep their accounts rather than an omission in the dataset.

For the same reason as Treasury’s administered expenses above: including it would inflate each state’s total with revenue the state did not raise and did not allocate program by program. GST is general revenue assistance that states may spend as they choose, so it does not belong in a like-for-like comparison of agency-level spending. Excluding GST for the states, and the Australian Office of Financial Management for the Commonwealth, means the default view compares government activity rather than accounting flows.