Is there an API for UK council spending over £500?

Not from government: the Local Government Transparency Code 2015 requires each local authority in England to publish every item of expenditure over £500, so each council publishes its own CSV or spreadsheet files, in its own layout, on its own site or through data.gov.uk. The Olympus UK Council Spending API loads the files of the English councils it covers into one schema: GET /v1/uk-council-spending/transactions searches payments by council, supplier name, Companies House number, date and amount, and GET /v1/uk-council-spending/coverage lists exactly which councils and months are loaded.

By New Odyssey · Published 2026-10-24 · Markdown

The official route, and what it lacks

Paragraph 28 of the Code says: "Local authorities must publish details of each individual item of expenditure that exceeds £500", with the date, department, beneficiary, purpose, amount, irrecoverable VAT and merchant category, at least quarterly. The duty is on each authority, so:

• there is one set of files per council, listed on the council's site or its catalogue entries on data.gov.uk;
• column names, date formats, thresholds (some councils publish over £250, or all spend) and VAT treatment differ from council to council;
• the data.gov.uk catalogue API finds the files but does not combine them, so totalling a supplier's payments across councils means downloading and mapping each council's files.

The Code applies to English local authorities only; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not covered by it.

What the UK Council Spending API serves

Payments English councils publish under the Local Government Transparency Code (most at over £500; some publish lower thresholds or all spend), as published, in one schema: search by council, supplier, date and amount, with supplier and council totals.

Limits

• Coverage is partial: only councils whose files are discoverable through catalogue APIs, and only the months they have published.
• Amounts, dates and VAT treatment are as each council publishes them; there are no common spending categories.
• Supplier grouping by normalised name is not identity; payees redacted by the council stay redacted.

Not included: councils outside the published list; contracts or tenders; purchase card files; grants registers; Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

At launch (October 2026) the API covered 12 English councils, with files from October 2025. Coverage is per council and per month: check months_missing before totalling a period, because a missing month is a gap in the data, not a month with no spending.

Example request and response

Payments of £10,000 or more by one council since April 2026:

curl -s "https://api.olympus.new-odyssey.com/v1/uk-council-spending/transactions?council=E08000035&amount_min=10000&date_from=2026-04-01&limit=1" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $OLYMPUS_API_KEY"

{
  "data": [
    {
      "transaction_id": "…",
      "council_code": "E08000035",
      "payment_date": "…",
      "amount": "…",
      "supplier": {
        "name": "…",
        "normalised_name": "…",
        "supplier_key": "…",
        "redacted": false,
        "company_number": "…",
        "charity_number": null
      },
      "department": "…",
      "expense_type": "…",
      "description": "…",
      "file_period": { "start": "…", "end": "…", "outside_period": false },
      "provenance": { "source_url": "…", "source_version": "…" }
    }
  ],
  "meta": {
    "datasets": [{ "dataset_id": "…", "freshness": "fresh" }],
    "notices": [{ "code": "as_published", "message": "…" }],
    "pagination": { "limit": 1, "has_more": true, "next_cursor": "…" }
  }
}

council is the council's ONS GSS code (here Leeds, E08000035); GET /v1/uk-council-spending/coverage lists the codes of every council loaded. Amounts are decimal strings in pounds, as published. Filter by supplier_name (a name prefix) or supplier_company_number to see one supplier's payments across councils, and pass meta.pagination.next_cursor back as cursor for the next page.

Coverage and refresh

Coverage: Only the English councils Olympus has published; GET /v1/uk-council-spending/coverage lists them with the months loaded and missing.

• Each council's published spending files from October 2025, as the council publishes them (monthly or quarterly).
• Councils are identified by ONS GSS codes; suppliers link to companies only where the file carries a Companies House number.

Refresh: Weekly (Tuesdays 06:00 America/New_York); unchanged files are not downloaded again. GET /v1/uk-council-spending/coverage lists exactly what is loaded right now.

Price

Every Olympus plan includes the UK Council Spending API and every other live API. The Free plan (no card) gives 1,000 requests a month to each live API at 10 requests a minute. Paid plans: Developer $79 a month (50,000 requests per API), Growth $299 a month (250,000 requests per API), Business $999 a month (1,000,000 requests per API); Enterprise from $2,500 a month on request. Prices in USD; see pricing for rate limits and what counts as a request.

Docs

• UK Council Spending API: what it serves and its endpoints
• API reference; OpenAPI contract at /openapi/uk-council-spending.yaml
• Coverage and known limits
• UK council spending over £500, explained
• Methodology
• Get a free API key, then send it in the X-API-Key header
• From an AI agent: the MCP server describes this API's coverage with get_product_coverage; data calls go through the REST API

Questions

Sources

• GOV.UK: Local government transparency code 2015
• data.gov.uk: Find open data

Related docs

• UK Council Spending API
• UK Council Spending API reference
• UK council spending over £500, explained
• Is there an API for Find a Tender and Contracts Finder?