This article examines the level of expenditure on health care provision in English and Welsh county boroughs during the inter-war period. It focuses in particular on key individual services such as maternity and child welfare to show that while there was a general trend to increased municipal health care expenditure, when this is disaggregated significant variations emerge between services, between boroughs and over time. It is argued that such analysis is of itself revealing, previously neglected and necessary for further qualitative analysis of the as yet little understood inter-war municipal medicine sector.