More than 920,000 householders have registered for the €100 household charge to date.
The Local Government Management Agency, which is administering the charge, said a total of 921,568 properties had been registered by noon today. The figure includes some 206,000 postal registrations which were yet to be processed.
An estimated 1.6 million properties were eligible for the charge, which was expected to generate some €160 million to go towards local authority funding. The latest figures suggest €92 million has been collected to date.
Some 74 per cent of properties were registered online and 15,159 households qualified for a waiver.
About 17,500 properties have registered online for the charge since the deadline passed on March 31st, with those paying late facing penalties of €10 plus 1 per cent interest. A total of 805,569 paid the charge by the deadline.
The Local Government Management Agency said it could take up to six weeks before a breakdown of how many households in each local authority paid the levy was available.
The charge is intended to replace the exchequer element of the Local Government Fund, set up in 1999 as one of the funding sources from central government to local government.
In 2011 exchequer funding was €164 million; in 2012 this was to be replaced by the household charge to the tune of €161 million.
However, no matter what success rate is ultimately achieved, unless 100 per cent of the charge is collected, local authorities will face a gap in their funding.
Local authorities are expected to begin sending letters to property owners who have not paid the household charge reminding them of the penalties and interest charges they face.
A spokesman for the Department of the Environment said the process was unlikely to begin until the backlog of postal registrations was cleared, which he said could take a couple of months.
Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan has said that local authorities will be incentivised to “pull out all the stops” to collect the outstanding portion of charge by giving them a greater proportion of the money generated.
