Tired of bone-shaking, battered roads? Sick of dodging chasms in the Macadam? Well, consider this: UK councils mend potholes at a unit cost that varies from the price of a roadside burger to what you might spend on a full set of tyres, with costs ranging from just over £4 to a staggering £656 each. That’s according to Freedom of Information (FOI) data gathered by the carmaker Citroën.

The gaping price divide can be partially explained by the fact that different councils use different processes to fix potholes. If everyone standardised at the cheapest method, over 33 million potholes could have been fixed in 2024 – 17 times the number that actually were.

Unsurprisingly, Citroën thinks we would all benefit from its cars’ famously squishy suspension systems. But we're more interested in which councils pay the most and least to fix their roads...

Britain is thought to have over a million potholes, but fixing them needn’t cost a fortune. Best value among the councils who replied to Citroën’s FOI request was Cardiff, which filled them in for as little as £4.13 per planned repair. 

Joining it in the frugal top five were two Yorkshire councils – Rotherham and East Riding – plus Worcester, and even a London Borough – Southwark. The average cost per pothole was £27.04 across these five, just 4% of the most expensive region's bill. 

Of course, different authorities cover different terrain and have different challenges. Plus, only 145 of the 284 councils contacted responded to the request. With that in mind, let’s look at the 20 most expensive places to fix a pothole. Is your local council on the list?

Roads in and around the ancient city of Chester have seen better days – such as when the Romans first built and maintained them, blissfully free of heavy vehicles, 24-hour traffic and drill-happy utility companies. Modern chariots have a harder time. 

Happily, this year, the local council will enjoy some £15.5 million to spend on repairs, an increase of more than half the amount budgeted in 2024, as part of a £1.6 billion UK government programme. It’s a significant amount, and at the council’s rate of £134.10 per repair, it could fill around 116,000 potholes. 

Part of the capital’s sprawling suburbia, Merton spends some £139.68 on each pothole repair. More than a third of its minor B and C roads are in poor condition, according to the Department for Transport – and the number of such problem highways has doubled in a year. 

We must remember though that, as with all London boroughs, Merton isn’t responsible for every road in its area. This is because many of the trunk routes are maintained by the capital’s transport authority, Transport for London, whose own repair figures are not included in Citroën’s report.

Tread carefully as you pass through the gateway to the West Country. In September, another FOI request found that the city of Bristol had been busy repairing over 3,000 potholes like the one pictured in the city’s Broomhill Road, spending some £476,000 in the process. That roughly corresponds to Citroën’s figure of £160 per repair. 

The council says its policy is to get the job “right first time” – making durable repairs using hot tar. But it also admits that sometimes, temporary fixes might be necessary in the first place, with contractors returning later to make good. 

All’s not well in England’s genteel hinterland. A survey in December by research organisation National Highways and Transport Network found that people in East Sussex are the country’s joint unhappiest when it comes to potholes, with just 5% satisfied with the state of local roads. Their council spends north of £161 on each repair, and has estimated it could cost some £300 million to bring the worst ones up to scratch. 

Despite these problems, East Sussex says it had 13,000 fewer pothole reports last year than in 2023. A spokesperson blamed severe weather in recent years for the condition of its highways. 

Leicester is home to the UK’s National Space Centre, but you don’t have to pay the entrance fee to witness a moonscape. In 2023, the city council was reportedly grappling with over 4,000 craters on its 526 miles (847km) of streets. Citroën’s figures suggest it spends well over double the national average of £72.37 fixing each one, at £163.69 per job. 

The council has spent millions patching up its roads over the last few years. It’s also had to pay more than £32,000 in compensation to members of the public who have fallen victim to potholes, and poor roads have caused nearly 150 accidents to boot, according to the local Leicester Mercury newspaper. 

The number of potholes on Ayrshire’s roads has doubled since 2021-22. Although South Ayrshire had the lowest number of the county's three local authorities, it still recorded 2,149 of them in 2023-24. According to an FOI request by a local political party it also paid out nearly £43,000 in compensation to motorists over vehicle damage between 2019 and 2024, and took up to 295 days to complete a repair. 

Overall, this relatively rural area in the west of the Scottish mainland has a rocky road to navigate.

The extreme northwest of Scotland can be an unforgiving environment, hence the Western Isles’ famously rugged Harris tweed. If only the local roads were so durable. It costs the council (known in Gaelic as Comhairle nan Eilen Siar) no less than £191.50 to fill each of its potholes. What’s Gaelic for “How much?”

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh on the council though, given that it’s responsible for roads in a remote 130-mile (209km) archipelago with difficult weather conditions. Materials might not always be on hand and distances can be long. Not like a mainland city then…

Oh. It turns out that road works in some urban mainland areas are even more expensive than in the remote Outer Hebrides. The city of Newport in Wales spends £193.88 repairing each of its potholes. An accident claims company found that it’s spent £1.4 million over the last three years trying to patch up the fraying blacktop.

Yet that hasn’t stopped it from shelling out over £21,000 in compensation over the same period, with 183 legal claims lodged by motorists. One of the most deprived areas in Wales, Newport Council says significant further investment in road repairs is ahead as part of its 2025-26 budget plans. 

Derby takes us into the £200+ bracket. The East Midlands city is set to spend more cash on its transport infrastructure, including over £75 million budgeted for road repairs as part of a regional grant from the Department for Transport. With each of its asphalt cavities costing £239.43 to fill, it’ll need every penny. 

Coincidentally, the surrounding county of Derbyshire, run by a separate authority, has been dubbed the pothole capital of the country, with the highest number of minor roads in poor condition, according to the RAC. Its council refutes the claim. 

Inner London isn't known as a cheap place, and road repairs seem to be no exception. The south London borough of Lambeth spent up to £264.94 each time its contractors made good a pothole. (You could probably buy a day’s on-street parking for that. Or maybe not).

Inevitably, such a high outlay is no recipe for pothole-free roads. In 2023, a FOI request by one of Britain’s political parties revealed it had 462 reported cases, with waiting times for repair of up to 300 days. Perhaps South London motorists would be better off doing the Lambeth Walk.

Last year, Perth & Kinross said it had dealt with over 10,000 potholes, though a fifth of these were not classed as permanent repairs. It spends a cool £276 on each job. 

Like many other authorities, the council's been experimenting with mechanisation to improve its performance. It’s trialled a giant machine called the JCB Pothole Pro (pictured) which can prepare a road defect for filling in as little as 10 minutes and make good four times as many as a conventional repair team. However, each Pothole Pro costs up to £200,000. 

Norfolk is a large, mainly rural county, which might help explain the £298.53 cost of repairing each of its potholes. Perhaps the vast East Anglian expanse makes it hard to reach some of them too: a 2023 FOI request revealed waiting times of up to 482 days for repairs. Alan Partridge would be seething. 

The Council points out that it has since achieved the top satisfaction rating in the National Highways and Transport Network study, and says it will resurface 320 miles (515km) of roads this year. That's almost 15% more than in 2024. Prevention is better than cure, but as we all know, potholes remain an implacable foe. 

With Bexley, we enter the local authorities that pour more than £300 into each repair. Perhaps not coincidentally, the RAC has found it to be among just three UK councils that didn’t resurface a single mile of road in 2023-24. 

Mind you, the RAC has also said Bexley is in pole position when it comes to the state of some of its tarmac, having no less than 96% of its minor roads in ‘green’ condition. That means no further action is necessary to improve them. 

With nearly 7,000 of them reported to the council last year, and costing a cool £345.05 each to fix, West Dunbartonshire’s potholes are no laughing matter. 

The council says it’s taking decisive action to tackle the problem. It’s bought five special vehicles that can quickly be adapted to work as gritters in winter and hot tar pothole fillers in the summer months. It claims this will save £171,000 a year on the cost of hiring separate machines. 

A 2023 inquiry by an opposition political party found Stoke-on-Trent has the longest pothole repair times of any area it examined, at up to 567 days. It also found some 4,111 craters had been reported to the council. The potteries are full of potholes then, and Citroën’s figures reveal that Stoke spends £452.06 to fix each one of them. 

If this is the case, then the cost of putting them all right would be over £1.85 million, while if the Staffordshire city made its repairs for the same outlay as Cardiff, it would cost under £17,000. 

Commencing the top five spenders is another Scottish authority, North Lanarkshire. Unhelpfully, it fell out with its former repairs contractor last year over awarding a new 12-year maintenance deal to a German company. The council denied any wrongdoing, and it prevailed when the issue was referred to the courts. 

Meanwhile, North Lanarkshire spends almost £480 filling each of its potholes. Almost 8,000 of them have been recorded since 2021-22, but even this is only a fraction of the more than 400,000 reported to councils across Scotland in the same period. 

Argyll & Bute covers areas on the Scottish mainland plus some 28 inhabited islands, so it’s a relatively complex territory. Over 80% of its road network is rural, and almost a quarter of it lies on peat. All of this might help explain the dizzying cost of putting its potholes right: no less than £513.01 per repair. 

Making things even more difficult is the damage wreaked by Storm Eowyn in January. Of the £10 million budgeted for road maintenance this financial year, some £2 million will be needed just to repair that. The region is home to the charmingly – and perhaps appropriately – named hamlet of Pottie (pictured). 

Smashing through the £600 barrier like a pneumatic drill is Coventry, which says it fixes around 6,500 potholes each year on a ‘worst first’ basis. If our figures are correct, that would add up to over £4.1 million.

The city will benefit from an increase in central government highway repair funding this year, which should see enough money to fix 88,000 potholes across the wider West Midlands region. We’ll see if it does the trick. If not, the local car-making industry might be kept busy turning out replacement shock absorbers. 

Shropshire is a rural idyll, but its pothole repair costs aree a nightmare. They're the second most expensive in Britain at a massive £654 each. The council says it repaired almost 36,000 last year and that nearly a quarter of them were completed within five days.

The council has blamed bad winters and flooding for the poor state of its roads. Next year it’s set to allocate some £33.6 million for road repairs – enough to fix another 51,000 holes, even at this sky-high unit cost. 

And the winner (or loser…) is: the Shetland Islands. Roadworks don’t come cheap when you’re almost halfway between Great Britain and Norway, surrounded by a hostile North Sea. The Lerwick-based council forked out an astonishing £656 for every planned pothole repair, over 158 times more than Cardiff did. 

In recent years, Shetland has brought in a ‘Roadmaster Patcher’ vehicle with a robotic arm that helps speed up road surface works, but its annual visit entails transporting it from the Scottish mainland, which no doubt adds to the unit cost of filling each pothole. Perhaps it’s just as well that these remote islands are more prosperous than other parts of Scotland, thanks to their oil and fish wealth.

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