Masbate · Component city
The capital of the island province of Masbate, reached by sea and by air. Cattle country, and host of the Rodeo Masbateño.
Confirmed
Confirmed
Not sourced
Not sourced
Single source
Not sourced
Population figure is the 2024 census. Badges mean what they say: Confirmed is two independent sources agreeing, Single source is one source not yet checked against a second, Not sourced is a field we will leave empty rather than fill. Our sources.
The official website
Checked 17 August 2026 as part of our regional transparency audit.
Could not audit
Returns HTTP 403 to automated requests, so we could not audit its disclosures. On 17 August 2026 we first recorded this city as having no website at all, because searching for one returned nothing official. The site exists; our method was the problem, and the correction is logged on our audit page rather than quietly applied.
Public money
Two streams of public money build things in every Philippine city. The national government builds roads, bridges and flood control through DPWH, and the city builds its own programs out of its own budget. The first is published as data. The second usually is not, so this section shows both and marks the difference.
DPWH, every LGU in the countrypublished
search term “MASBATE CITY”
sum of all contract amounts
11 still under construction
distinct names on the contracts
no contract amount yet
Pulled 18 August 2026 from the DPWH projects API behind bisto.ph, a BetterGov.ph and TAPAT initiative under a Memorandum of Cooperation with DPWH. The API records location as province and district engineering office only, with no city field, so this is a full-text match on the project description.
| Category | Projects | Contract value |
|---|---|---|
| Roads | 49 | ₱942.3M |
| Buildings and Facilities | 56 | ₱691.4M |
| Flood Control and Drainage | 3 | ₱111.8M |
| Bridges | 5 | ₱64.7M |
| Water Provision and Storage | 4 | ₱11.1M |
117 of 150 projects carry one of the clean category strings. The other 33 hold a fund code such as “GAA 2025 SSP” or two categories in one field. That is dirt in the source data and we count it as unclassified rather than guess.
Hi-Tone Construction & Development Corp. holds 3 of the 150 contracts in Masbate City, worth ₱346.5M. The five largest names together hold 44.1%.
Concentration is not evidence that anything improper happened, and this page does not suggest it is. Bicol has a small pool of firms with the bonding capacity for national road work, and a specialist winning repeatedly is an ordinary outcome. It is still a number worth knowing, so here it is against its peers, largest single contractor share in each of the seven Bicol cities.
Shares are of each city’s own contract value, not of the region. Names are matched as DPWH records them, so a joint venture counts as its own name and a firm appearing both alone and in a joint venture is undercounted here. The regional contractor view.
the city’s own budgetnothing published
We could not find a machine-readable list of the programs and projects Masbate City funds from its own budget, at any stage. That is the ordinary state of affairs in Bicol, not a mark against this LGU in particular. One city in the region publishes it, and the software it uses is free.
Naga City runs the People’s Budget Portal, built by WeSolve Foundation and Stride Technologies with support from BetterGov.PH. It is licensed AGPL-3.0 and its makers state it is meant as a foundation any LGU can adopt. See what it produces.
If Masbate City publishes this somewhere we missed, tell us and it goes up with attribution.
the city’s own projectsnothing published
For city-funded work there is no register anywhere in the region of what was awarded, to whom, for how much, and whether it was finished. Proposals get published. Bid invitations get published. What happened next does not.
The gap matters because it is the only stage a resident can check with their own eyes. A road either exists or it does not. Until an LGU publishes awards and completion, the national projects in Stage 1 are the only public works in Masbate City anyone outside city hall can follow from money to concrete.
Elected officials
Names carry the same badges as the figures above. We publish an unchecked name as unchecked, or not at all. A wrong name against a real office is the fastest way for a site like this to lose its standing.
Services
Twelve of these are handled by the city hall and four are national services with offices in Bicol. Requirements vary by LGU, which is what the Citizens Charter is for.