Working out the planning fee for an application

Planning application fee calculation starts with one question: what kind of application is this? Get the category right and the figure follows from a published table. Get it wrong and the council returns the application as invalid, the eight week clock never starts, and you lose two or three weeks to an exchange of emails about whether your loft conversion is householder development.

The figures themselves live in the Town and Country Planning (Fees for Applications, Deemed Applications, Requests and Site Visits) (England) Regulations 2012, as amended several times since. Do not take a fee from a blog post, a printed leaflet or a council page that has not been updated. Take it from the current regulations or the council's current fee sheet.

Where the current figures live

Three sources, in order of authority.

The Fees Regulations 2012 as amended are the law. The consolidated version on legislation.gov.uk carries the schedules with the fee for each category, and the amendment notes tell you which instrument last changed them.

The Planning Practice Guidance chapter on fees explains how the categories work and how the regulations are applied, including the treatment of concurrent applications and retrospective applications.

Your council's own fee page is the practical check. Councils publish the figures they will accept, and their validation team applies them. Where the council's page and your reading of the regulations differ, ring the validation team before you submit rather than after.

The Planning Portal's fee calculator is useful for narrowing the category, and most people use it. It is a guide, not a determination. The council decides whether the fee paid is correct.

Using the calculator and checking the result

Work through it in this order:

1. Decide the application type first: householder, full, outline, prior approval, listed building consent, advertisement consent, lawful development certificate, discharge of conditions, section 73 variation or section 96A non material amendment.
2. For full applications, establish the measure the fee band uses. Dwellings are counted by number. Other buildings are measured by gross internal floorspace created. Outline applications are charged by site area in hectares.
3. Check whether anything on your site pushes you into a second category, because one application can only sit in one.
4. Add the online submission service charge if you are applying through the Portal.
5. Screenshot the result with the date. If the fee is later queried, you want the figure you were shown.

The measure is where people slip. A single storey rear extension is counted as householder development with a flat fee, but a scheme that creates a new dwelling in the garden is counted in the dwellings band, and an outbuilding converted to an office for a business run from home may be a change of use as well as building work.

Category traps

The householder category is narrower than it sounds. It covers alterations or extensions to a single dwellinghouse, including works within its curtilage, and it does not cover:

• Works to a flat. That is a full application, whatever the scale.
• Works to more than one dwelling under a single application.
• Anything involving a change of use as well as physical works.
• Development outside the residential curtilage, including land brought into the garden from a field.

Listed building consent carries no fee. If your project is an extension to a listed house you will submit two applications, pay the householder fee on the planning application and nothing on the consent, and you will need a Heritage Statement to support both. Applications for works to trees protected by a Tree Preservation Order also carry no fee.

Where an Article 4 direction has removed permitted development rights, you have to apply for something that would otherwise have been free of charge. The direction itself does not create a fee exemption, which surprises people. Checking whether a direction covers your property is worth doing before you budget, and our guide to checking Article 4 directions in the national dataset shows how to do it from the published data. The same applies to conservation area boundaries, which change the drawings and documents you need rather than the fee itself, and can be traced through the national conservation area dataset.

Retrospective applications are charged as if the development had been applied for in advance. There is no penalty rate and no discount.

Repeat applications and the concession for a second attempt

The Fees Regulations have long included a concession allowing one further application for development of the same character on the same site, within a set period after the first decision or withdrawal, without a further fee. Applicants and agents call it the free go.

Two cautions. The concession has conditions attached about the applicant, the site and the description of development, and it has been narrowed by amendment more than once. Read the current consolidated regulation rather than a summary, and confirm with the council's validation team that they accept your second application as falling within it. A resubmission rejected on fee grounds wastes more time than the fee would have cost.

Where a refusal is going to appeal rather than resubmission, the appeal itself carries no fee to the Planning Inspectorate, though a householder appeal has a 12 week deadline from the decision date rather than the six months that applies generally.

Exemptions and concessions

The ones that come up most often for householders and small applicants:

• Works to a dwelling to improve access or facilities for a disabled person are exempt.
• Listed building consent and conservation area tree works applications carry no fee.
• Applications by certain non profit sports clubs for playing field development attract a reduced fee.
• Where two or more applications are submitted for the same development on the same day, the fee is charged once, at the highest applicable rate.

Each of these has wording that matters. The disabled access exemption, for example, turns on the works being required for a disabled person who lives or will live in the dwelling, not on the applicant's general intention to make a house accessible in future. Read the regulation.

Indexation and why old figures mislead

Fees were increased in December 2023 and are now subject to annual indexation, applied from 1 April each year under powers taken in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023. That means any figure published before the most recent April is out of date by definition.

Two practical habits follow. Quote fees to clients as a category plus a pointer to the current schedule rather than a number in a proposal that will be read in six months. And if you are working from a fee note in an old project file, replace the figure rather than adjusting it in your head.

As an illustrative example, a householder planning a rear extension and a garden office in the same submission might reasonably expect one householder fee, discover that the garden office as a business use is a change of use requiring a full application, and end up paying the full application rate on the dwellings and floorspace measure instead. The fee difference is not the problem. The three weeks lost to invalidation is.

What happens if the fee is wrong at validation

Nothing dramatic, but nothing good either. The application is not valid until the correct fee is received, so the determination period does not begin. The council will write to you asking for the balance, and most authorities set a deadline after which they return the application.

That matters in three situations. Where a permission is about to expire and you are trying to submit before a deadline. Where a condition has to be discharged before work can start and a contract date is fixed. And where a planning agreement or a funding condition depends on a submission date. In all three, an underpaid fee moves the valid date, not just the paperwork.

So do the arithmetic before the drawings are finished, not on the day of submission. Then check the figure against the council's page on the morning you submit, because 1 April moves quietly.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Fee categories and figures are set by regulation and indexed annually, so check the current schedule with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it.

If you also want to know what the supporting documents will cost, PlanScope pricing is one free report, £50 per report, or £150 per month for Professional. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.