By entering your property tax classification and assessed value (which can be found on your assessment notice, or recent property tax bill), you can see how your tax dollars are spent on all the services the City of Stratford provides.
For 2025, the City’s budgeted expenses are approximately $182 million. Just over half of that amount is covered by grants, user fees and other revenues, which leaves approximately $86 million to be collected through property taxes.
For additional detail, we have separated the day-to-day expenses (including things like salaries, benefits, contracted services and other operating expenses) from the amounts directed to infrastructure reserves. That way, you can see how much of your tax dollars are going to support the City’s capital programs in the different areas.
It’s important to note that some programs are funded more heavily through grants from other sources, including upper levels of government. So the amount of municipal tax dollars attributed to those services does not necessarily reflect their weighting in the budget. For example, less than 1% of municipal tax dollars are used for Social Services programs, but in fact, Social Services represents almost 40% of our total budgeted expenses. This just means that most of Social Services programming is funded from grants and other sources.
Where ‘shared’ is denoted, this means that the City is in a cost-sharing arrangement with other area municipalities.
The City of Stratford collects education taxes on behalf of the Province, and distributes them to the local school boards. These amounts are also included in the calculation
For more information regarding the budget process and supporting documents, please click here:
For more information regarding the specific line items, please click here: