Not all revenue is recurring

Investment income in 2024 was $312 million — council’s original budget for the year was $110 million, so the actual came in +183% vs budget. That gap is not the City quietly sandbagging revenue forecasts. It’s a one-time portfolio rebalancing on top of higher-than-budgeted bond yields — neither of which repeats every year.

The chart below shows the same actual-vs-budget pair for every year in the 2020–2024 span. A flat actual line in isolation would imply this is a recurring revenue source. It isn’t. Treating any single year’s actual as a baseline overstates ongoing revenue capacity.

Calgary owns ENMAX Corporation outright. The City books its share of ENMAX’s net earnings as “equity in earnings of ENMAX Corporation” on the consolidated statement of operations — that figure was $181 million in 2024. Net earningsis not the same as the cash dividend ENMAX pays the City — the dividend is declared by the ENMAX board and disclosed separately in ENMAX’s own annual report. The two numbers track loosely but not precisely; in years where ENMAX retains earnings to fund grid investment, the dividend can lag the earnings figure substantially.

Both move with energy market conditions. A common framing in council debate — “the City makes money from ENMAX so it doesn’t need taxes” — collapses a market-dependent revenue line into a recurring one. The per-line trend above shows the swing.

Government transfers from the federal and provincial governments come in two flavours. Operating transfers — generally cost-shared programs that recur each year — were $179 million in 2024. Capital transfers — project-specific tranches like federal Green Line funding or provincial Municipal Sustainability Initiative allocations — were $685 million.

The two are kept on separate lines in the AFR for a reason. Capital tranches arrive in lumps and disappear when the project closes — including them in a “total transfers” trend smooths over the lumpiness and makes one-time spikes (a federal infrastructure top-up, a provincial flood-recovery tranche) look like baseline revenue growth. The per-line trend above keeps them apart; the revenue-mix bar shows their separate shares.

Net taxes available for municipal purposes — the property tax revenue Calgary collects on its own behalf, after remitting the provincial education property tax to the Province — was $2,628 million in 2024. That’s the largest single revenue line on this page and roughly 43% of total City revenue. This is the City-wide view — see alsohow this maps to your bill→ is a separate question that the property-taxes section answers parcel-by-parcel.

A note on framing: net municipal tax revenue grew +23.8% across the 2020–2024span. Calgary’s population grew +14.2% over the same period. A councillor citing the headline growth figure without naming population growth and the assessment-roll shift conflates two different things — the per-capita view above is the corrective.