Methodology

Every figure is transcribed by hand from a primary source: each council’s audited annual accounts. The remuneration report inside them is a statutory disclosure under the Local Authority Accounts (Scotland) Regulations 2014, and an external auditor has signed it off. Nothing here is estimated, inferred or averaged. Where a council disclosed nothing, the record shows a dash and a note. It never shows a zero it was not given.

Who is in the register. The £100k list covers officers whose salary, including fees and allowances, went above £100,000 in their council’s most recent audited year. Anyone who only crosses £100,000 once pension or benefits are added is left out. So is an officer who worked part of a year and was paid less than £100,000 in it, even where the full-year rate would have been higher. Returning-officer and election fees are counted exactly as the accounts count them, and noted row by row.

The trajectory. Behind the charts sit six years of each council’s full senior-team disclosure, with no £100,000 floor. The indexed chart on each council page sets the chief executive’s pay against that council’s own Band D charge, from the Scottish Government series and excluding water and sewerage, with the first recorded year at 100. Two further official series stand behind the real-terms figures quoted in the text: CPI from the ONS and median full-time gross annual pay in Scotland from ASHE. Both are calendar-year series, lined up with the start of each financial year.

Cash and real terms. The statutory pay-band disclosure counts every employee paid above £50,000, in £5,000 bands. That £50,000 is a fixed cash line. As prices rise, staff cross it without anybody deciding anything, so the raw count flatters whoever wants to be angry about it. The charts plot the cash count, exactly as the accounts state it, and the basis note under each one gives the same count above a threshold held at a constant real value: £50,000 of 2019/20 money, restated each year by CPI. Where the restated threshold lands inside a £5,000 band, that band’s staff are split in proportion to the part of the band above the line, which assumes salaries sit evenly across a band. Using the median Scottish wage as the deflator instead of CPI gives the same picture, and both are in the JSON. One more warning that belongs on the face of every chart: the 2023/24 figures across Scotland are pushed up by the backdated 2022/23 teachers’ pay award, paid in April 2023.

Names. Many councils disclose their senior officers as an initial and a surname. Where a full name appears here, a document established it: the council’s committee papers and reports, its other statutory publications, Companies House filings, or the body’s own accounts. Each identification carries its evidence and a confidence grade. The ones marked corroborated rest on independent sources agreeing rather than on a single document naming the person in the post, and they are labelled that way on the page. Nothing is published on inference alone. Four names in the accounts, one arm’s-length director and seventeen banded trust disclosures could not be established from any document, so they appear exactly as the accounts printed them.

Four councils lag. Clackmannanshire, East Dunbartonshire, Stirling and West Dunbartonshire had not published audited 2024/25 accounts when we last checked. Their records stop at 2023/24 and say so on the page.

Pensions. Employer pension is what the council pays into an officer’s pension on top of the salary. Two councils disclose it only to the nearest £1,000. Some officers are not in the scheme at all, so their entry is a dash, and no total anywhere on this site quietly fills that gap with a zero.

Their errors are their errors. The record reproduces the accounts as printed, including the misprints and the totals that do not add up, with the discrepancy flagged in the notes. If a council restates a figure in a later audited document, the record follows the restatement and says so.

The database, the source list and the build code are open, and every table links to the document it was read from. If you find a mistake in here, it will be corrected and the correction logged.