A Latin: civitas stipendaria or Latin: stipendiaria, meaning "tributary state/community", was the lowest and most common type of towns and local communities under Roman rule.
Each Roman province comprised a number of communities of different status. Alongside Roman colonies or Latin: [[municipia]], whose residents held the Roman citizenship or Latin citizenship, a province was largely formed by self-governing communities of natives (peregrini), which were distinguished according to the level of autonomy they had: the Latin: civitates stipendariae were the lowest grade, after the Latin: [[civitates foederatae]] ("allied states") which were bound to Rome by formal treaty (Latin: [[foedus]]), and the Latin: [[civitates liberae]] ("free states"), which were granted specific privileges. The Latin: civitates stipendariae were by far the most common of the three—for example, in 70 BC in Sicily there were 65 such cities, as opposed to only five Latin: civitates liberae and two Latin: foederatae—and furnished the bulk of a province's revenue.