Trying to count the associations between categories and posts

I am creating a blog CMS using Laravel 5.2. In my application there is a one-to-many relationship between posts and categories, where a post has one category.

My posts table has a 'category_id' attribute that links to the categories table 'id' attribute.

On my categories index page I have a table allowing users to delete categories or add more, and would like to include a column on this table that has the number of posts in each category. I have considered rolling back my migrations and adding a num_posts attribute to the categories table, but I feel like there is a better way.

My solution was to add the following function to the Category model:

public static function allWithCount()
{
    //  grab all categories and posts
    $categories = Category::orderBy('id')->get();
    $posts      = Post::all();

    //  create new categories array with num_posts attribute
    $categoriesArray = [];

    for($i = 0; $i < count($categories); $i++)
    {
        $counter = 0;

        foreach($posts as $post)
        {
            if($categories[$i]->id == $post->category_id)
            {
                $counter++;
            }
        }

        //  copy the category over to the new array with $counter
        $categoriesArray[$i]['id']          = $categories[$i]->id;
        $categoriesArray[$i]['category']    = $categories[$i]->category;
        $categoriesArray[$i]['num_posts']   = $counter;
    }

    return $categoriesArray;
}

This function achieved what I want it to do, but now I have another problem. I have a many-to-many relationship between tags and posts. Tag's index is almost identical to the categories index, including needing a number of posts column. Now I'm in a position where I'm copying a function from one model to another, which I know is terrible practice and will result in brittle code.

Now that I'm in this position I know that there must be a better way to go about this. Should I just include a num_posts attribute in my tags and categories tables? Is there already an eloquent function that achieves my goal (a google search didn't result in anything)?

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