Local fee setting powers and what they mean for applicants

Planning application fees in England are set centrally. The same householder application costs the same in Cumbria as it does in Croydon, because the figure comes from regulations made under section 303 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 rather than from the council banking the money. Fees were uplifted in December 2023 and annual indexation began in April 2025, so the number moves every spring.

The proposal that keeps returning is to let authorities set their own fees on a cost recovery basis. For an architect pricing work across several boroughs, the practical question is narrower than the political one: what actually varies today, and what would vary if the power were used.

How the national system works now

Fees regulations set a fee for each application type, usually by reference to floorspace, site area or the number of dwellings. Householder applications, full applications, outline applications, reserved matters, prior approvals, lawful development certificates and applications to vary conditions each have their own basis.

Two features are worth holding in mind when budgeting.

The fee is calculated on the application as submitted, so a scheme that grows by one unit between drawing and submission can cross a band. And the fee is payable on validation, not on determination, so it is spent whether or not the application succeeds.

Indexation means the schedule changes annually. Quote the current figure from the government's published guidance or the fee calculator rather than from a spreadsheet you built last year, because a stale fee is the most avoidable cause of an invalid application.

What local fee setting would allow

The argument for it is that the national fee does not cover the cost of determining applications, that the shortfall is met from council tax, and that under-resourced planning departments are slower as a result. Cost recovery, on that view, buys capacity.

The argument against is that applicants have no choice of authority, so a charge set by the body providing the service is not disciplined by competition, and that higher fees do not automatically translate into more planners.

Where the debate has landed is on safeguards. The versions discussed have involved fees limited to the cost of providing the service, a requirement to publish the calculation, consultation before a change, and a national default for authorities that do not set their own. Whether those powers are in force, and whether any authority has used them, are questions to check rather than assume. The planning law updates timeline is a reasonable place to follow where the position has got to.

The charges that are already local

This is the part most people underestimate. A substantial share of what a project pays a council is already set locally and is not capped by anything.

Pre-application advice is the clearest example. Some authorities charge a modest sum for a written response to a householder enquiry. Others operate tiered packages for major schemes running into thousands of pounds, with separate charges for meetings, for officer attendance at design review and for follow-up correspondence. The service offered varies as much as the price.

Planning performance agreements sit above that, with a bespoke fee negotiated for a programme of engagement on a large scheme. There is no schedule and no ceiling.

Then there are the smaller charges that accumulate. Written confirmation that a condition has been complied with. Monitoring fees attached to a section 106 agreement. Charges for copies of documents, for street naming and numbering, and for various discretionary letters that a lender or a buyer will eventually ask for.

None of these appear in the national regulations. All of them appear in the council's own fees and charges schedule, which is published and worth downloading before you quote a client.

Discharge of conditions and the cost of a heavy consent

Discharging conditions is charged nationally per request rather than per condition, which creates an obvious incentive to bundle. It also creates an equally obvious problem: bundling ten conditions into one submission means all ten wait for the slowest.

The bigger cost is not the fee. It is the consultant time preparing what each condition requires, and that is set at the point the permission is granted rather than when the condition is discharged. A permission carrying fifteen pre-commencement conditions has a cost attached to it that no fee schedule shows.

Negotiating condition wording before the decision is issued is therefore the most effective fee saving available, and it costs nothing.

Where no fee is payable

The exemptions are narrower than people hope but they are real, and missing one means paying money you did not owe.

• Applications required only because permitted development rights were withdrawn by an Article 4 direction or by a condition on an earlier permission.
• Works to alter or extend a dwelling to improve access, safety, health or comfort for a disabled occupant.
• Listed building consent, which carries no fee of its own.
• A repeat application for substantially the same development on the same site by the same applicant, within the period the regulations specify, where the first was withdrawn or refused. This concession applies once.

Each of these has conditions attached in the regulations, so read the wording rather than the summary. Where you think an exemption applies, say so in the covering letter with the regulation cited, because a validation officer working through a queue will otherwise reject the application for an unpaid fee.

Two further points come up often enough to be worth stating. A deemed application arising from an enforcement appeal carries its own fee basis, which surprises appellants. And an application submitted with the wrong fee is not invalid forever, but the eight or thirteen week clock does not start until the fee is right, so the practical cost of an underpayment is time rather than money.

Budgeting across authorities

For a practice working across several districts, the sensible approach separates the fixed from the variable.

1. Take the application fee from the current national schedule, and diarise a review each April when indexation applies.
2. Download each authority's fees and charges schedule and record the pre-application tiers, the monitoring fee basis and any discretionary charges.
3. Ask, at pre-application stage, what the authority's validation list requires, because the cost of the supporting documents dwarfs the fee on most schemes.
4. Price condition discharge as a work item rather than a fee item.
5. Build in a contingency for a second application, since the fee concession covers one repeat only.

Point three is where the money actually sits. On a minor application the fee might be a few hundred pounds while the supporting reports run to several thousand, so scoping which supporting documents the application needs early has more effect on the budget than any change to the fee regime would.

If local fee setting does arrive in a form authorities use, expect the variation to be visible but modest against that background. The larger risk is administrative: different fees in different districts, changing at different times, with a validation officer entitled to reject anything underpaid.

Enter the site postcode on PlanScope to see which reports your scheme is likely to need before you price the work. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval. This is general guidance, not legal advice. Fee schedules change annually, so check the current schedule with your local planning authority before relying on any figure.