Parish and town precept on your 2026/27 council tax bill

How the parish precept appears on the bill

Open any English council tax bill for a parished area in 2026/27 and you will find a line labelled with the name of your parish or town council (for example, Shipston-on-Stour Town Council or Filongley Parish Council) and the annual amount. On the average parished bill that line is around £82 a year on Band D, although the range is very wide: from a few pounds in some small rural parishes to over £400 in some large town councils with substantial service responsibilities.

Parish councils are the third tier of local government in England, below district and county or unitary councils. They cover roughly 39 per cent of the English population, with no parish coverage in central London, much of inner outer London, and several other urban areas. In Wales the equivalent body is the community council; in Scotland community councils exist but cannot set a precept and so do not appear on bills. The parish, town and community councils together are often called the parish sector or first-tier local government.

Why the parish precept is uncapped

Every other council on the bill has its precept-setting power capped by the central government referendum threshold. Parish and town councils are explicitly excluded from that cap. The exclusion dates from the original referendum-cap legislation introduced in 2012, when the Department for Communities and Local Government deemed parish councils too small to be worth the administrative burden of cap-setting. The exclusion has been retained at every subsequent settlement, despite occasional calls from individual MPs to extend the cap.

The consequence is that the highest parish and town precepts can rise by very large percentages from one year to the next. The most-cited recent examples are large town councils taking on a leisure centre or public toilets from a financially pressured district council, where the cost has to be raised through the precept rather than absorbed by the existing district. A rise of 50 per cent or more on a town council's precept is not uncommon in such a year.

What parish councils actually do

The vast majority of parish councils are small, with budgets between £10,000 and £100,000 a year. Common spending areas include allotments, sports pitches, play areas, public footpaths, village halls, bus shelters, churchyard maintenance (where the parish maintains a closed churchyard), community minibuses, defibrillators, neighbourhood plans, and small grants to local groups. Many parish councils also pay a clerk and an office cost; the clerk is the salaried administrative officer who runs the council's business between meetings.

Larger town councils (such as Reigate and Banstead Town Council, or Aylesbury Town Council) have multi-million pound budgets and run a broader range of services: leisure centres, parks, public toilets, festivals and events, museums, civic regalia, town centre management, and sometimes a more substantial staff. Their statutory powers are still much narrower than a district council's (no planning authority, no environmental health, no housing function) but their service footprint can be substantial in practice.

Welsh community councils have similar functions to English parish councils. Some Welsh community councils, particularly in mid-Wales, are very small, while others (such as Llanelli Town Council) are large and run substantial services. The legal framework is set out in the Local Government Acts 1972 and 1992 with Welsh-specific amendments.

Per-parish precept range

The range of parish precepts across England is wide. National Association of Local Councils figures for 2025/26 (the most recent published) show the smallest precepts at around £5 a year on Band D for rural parishes with minimal service responsibilities, and the largest at over £400 a year on Band D for some town councils that have absorbed leisure or parks services from their district. The median is around £80 to £85.

Particularly high-precept town councils in recent years include Salisbury, Frome, Stevenage, Tunbridge Wells, and several large town councils in Cornwall and Shropshire. Where the precept is unusually high, it usually reflects a specific service absorption from the upper tier, and the town council's own budget papers will explain the increase.

How the parish precept scales across the bands

Because the parish precept is presented as a Band D figure and every other band is a statutory proportion of Band D, the parish precept scales by band the same way as every other precept. On the national average parished bill the parish precept adds approximately:

• £55 on Band A (six-ninths of Band D's £82)
• £64 on Band B (seven-ninths)
• £73 on Band C (eight-ninths)
• £82 on Band D
• £100 on Band E (eleven-ninths)
• £118 on Band F (thirteen-ninths)
• £137 on Band G (fifteen-ninths)
• £164 on Band H (eighteen-ninths)

Discounts and the parish precept

Every council tax discount applies to the entire gross bill including the parish precept. A 25 per cent single occupant discount on a Band D bill in a parished area reduces the £82 parish precept by 25 per cent to £61.50. The full council tax reduction award removes the whole bill, parish precept included. There is no separate appeal route for the parish precept.

Transparency and scrutiny

Parish councils with budgets above £25,000 are subject to the Transparency Code for Smaller Authorities 2014, which requires them to publish their budget, year-end accounts, bank statements, minutes of meetings, and the schedule of payments. Larger town councils file an annual return that is externally audited. The transparency obligations are looser than for upper-tier councils but provide enough information to challenge a specific precept proposal at the consultation stage.

The single most effective way to engage with the parish precept is to attend the precept-setting meeting (usually in January). Every parish, town and community council has to give public notice of the meeting at which the precept will be set, and members of the public have the right to attend and ask questions during the public-participation section. The minutes of that meeting will set out the rationale for the precept rise.

For more on bill components

The parish or town precept is one of several lines on the typical English council tax bill in a parished area. The others are the council itself, the adult social care precept (for upper-tier authorities), and the police and fire precepts. In London the GLA precept consolidates several of these lines: see the GLA precept page. For the full picture of what the council itself spends on, see what council tax pays for.