How long planning permission takes.

Eight weeks is the floor, not the forecast.

Reviewed August 2026

The short answer

Eight weeks for a householder or minor application, thirteen for major development, counted from the day the application is complete rather than the day you submit it. Those are statutory floors. Extensions of time are routine, and the date that matters is the decision notice, not the committee.

In practice · Victoria Court

Three ways to change a permission

A permission is not the end of the drawing. Most schemes change afterwards, and the route decides how long it takes.

The order of work

01Read the consentWhat the conditions tie the scheme to.

02Size the changeMaterial or not, which picks the route.

03Choose the clockTwenty-eight days, eight weeks, or start again.

04Keep the chainVary the permission you mean to build.

A former care home on Kenilworth Road in Leamington Spa, in the conservation area, consented in September 2017 for eight homes: apartments in the villa, townhouses behind, a house at the back.

The job

Site: A former care home on Kenilworth Road, Leamington Spa
Role: Delivery architect, appointed after consent, on another practice's permission
Changes: Warwick District Council refs W/17/2402 and W/19/0888, and one non-material amendment
Outcome: Eight homes, built and sold

That original permission was another practice's. We were appointed after it was granted, to detail the scheme and see it built. It changed three times, each by a different route.

The first was substantial. The plans, large-scale details and bat mitigation conditions were varied under section 73, letting the elevations move and the rear house be redesigned from scratch with a basement and lightwell. That house is our design.

The second was the townhouse rooflights, carried by a non-material amendment. No new permission, no site notice, twenty-eight days to decide.

The third added a garage, rebuilt the boundary wall and removed the open space condition. A second section 73, granted August 2019.

Note what that third one varied: not the original permission, but a condition of the first section 73. A section 73 does not edit the consent it refers to; it grants a new one alongside it, and both stay live. So the permission to vary is always the one you mean to build. And it buys no time: the deadline for starting stays where the first permission set it.

Non-material has no statutory definition. It is a judgement for the authority to make in the round, and the working test is whether anyone consulted on the original application would want to comment again. A change that reads from the street rarely passes it. They are also judged cumulatively, the authority weighing each change together with every earlier one, so a fourth small amendment can fail where the first three passed.

A section 73 cannot change the description of development, and it is unavailable altogether once a permission has expired unimplemented. Where a change is bigger than the description allows, a fresh application is the only route left, and the conditions already discharged then have to be discharged again on the new permission.

One thing neither route can touch. Since February 2024 the biodiversity gain condition cannot be removed or disapplied by a section 73 or by a non-material amendment, and a variation that changes what the site will hold after development can require a fresh biodiversity gain plan before the new permission is usable.

The proof

Four consents, four different clocks.

After consent · varied

Victoria Court, Leamington

A former care home in the conservation area, taken to eight homes. The consent was another practice's; the three changes made to it afterwards were ours, and each took a different route. Two section 73 variations and one non-material amendment, and the scheme was built and sold.

Warwick District Council refs W/17/2402 and W/19/0888

Prior approval · 56 days

Green Gate Barns

A redundant steel-framed agricultural barn taken to two homes by prior approval rather than by a planning application. On that route the work may begin once fifty-six days have passed without the authority giving notice of a decision, so the deadline carries a consequence that an ordinary one does not.

Solihull MBC ref PL/2022/01375/PNCUDW · August 2022

Two consents · one job

Barby Wood Farmhouse

A listed ironstone farmhouse and three curtilage-listed outbuildings, brought together into one home. Listed building consent and full planning permission are separate applications running separate clocks, and both had to be in hand before anything could start. They were granted five days apart.

West Northamptonshire Council · both granted February 2025

Conditions · after consent

Ashlawn Road, Rugby

A private house extended over a protected bat roost. Consent was not the end of the programme, because a pre-commencement condition is a second application with a clock of its own. The ecology evidence went in with the application, and the condition was discharged ahead of the council's own target date.

Rugby Borough Council ref R24/0879 · discharged April 2025

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01 · The clock

First, find which clock you are on

There is not one planning clock. Which of them applies is settled by what is being applied for, not by how complicated the scheme is or how busy the authority happens to be.

The statutory periods

8 weeks: Development that is not major, which covers householder work and most small schemes
13 weeks: Major development
10 weeks: Public service infrastructure development
16 weeks: Development subject to Environmental Impact Assessment

The first three sit in article 34 of the Development Management Procedure Order 2015. The sixteen weeks is not a fourth entry on that list: regulation 68 of the Environmental Impact Assessment Regulations 2017 rewrites the first two, so that eight and thirteen are both read as sixteen wherever an assessment is required.

If what a site needs is a prior approval rather than a planning permission, none of those periods applies to it. Class Q, Class MA and the other prior approval routes each run to a clock of their own, and Class Q's is fifty-six days.

All of them start when the application is complete. The period runs from the day after the council has the drawings, the documents and the fee, not from the day the form was sent and not from the day somebody gets round to registering it. An application arriving one drawing short is not refused; it sits unregistered, and the days it spends there are counted by nobody.

None of these periods is a forecast. In the quarter to March 2026, nineteen per cent of major applications in England were decided inside the thirteen weeks, and thirty-eight per cent of minor ones inside the eight. Counted the way the government counts them, which treats an agreed extension or a performance agreement as on time, the same two figures are ninety-one and eighty-seven per cent.

Whether a scheme is major is a definition rather than a judgement: ten or more dwellings, a site of half a hectare or more where the number of dwellings is not yet known, a thousand square metres of new floorspace, or a site of one hectare. One dwelling either side of that line moves the period by five weeks.

Technical details consent, the second half of the permission in principle route, is the one most often quoted wrongly. It runs to ten weeks where the development is major and five weeks where it is not.

A consultation on an accelerated planning system closed in May 2024 and proposed a shorter period for major commercial schemes. No response to it has been published and none of the periods above has changed. The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 altered how decisions are delegated and how fees are set, but not how long a council has to decide.

02 · The overrun

Where the weeks actually go

Four things account for most of the difference between those two sets of figures, and only the first is inside an applicant's control.

Cause 01

Validation

An application arriving without every document on the council's published list is not refused. It is simply not registered, and the period does not begin until it is. This is the one stretch of the timetable an applicant controls outright.

Where it bites: the weeks before an application is registered show up in no published figure at all.

Cause 02

Consultees

Highways, drainage, ecology, conservation, the lead local flood authority, the parish council. Each has twenty-one days to give a substantive response, and an application is not usually decided while one of them is still outstanding.

Where it bites: one late reply on a small point holds a whole application, and it cannot be chased from outside.

Cause 03

Amendments

An officer raises a point, the drawings are revised, and the revised drawings go back out to consultation. Taking the amendment is usually better than taking the refusal, but the consultation period runs again from the day the new drawings are published.

Where it bites: every round of change adds a fresh consultation period on top of the one already run.

Cause 04

After the committee

An application that attracts enough objection is decided at a meeting held once a month, so the date comes from the diary rather than from the case. And what a committee gives is a resolution to grant, which is not yet a permission at all.

Where it bites: where a section 106 is attached, months can pass between the vote and the notice issuing.

03 · The extension

When the period runs out

Very few applications are refused for want of information. What arrives instead is a request for an extension of time, usually a few days before the statutory period ends and usually by email.

An extension of time is a written agreement between the applicant and the authority to decide the application after the statutory date. It is provided for in the same article that sets the period, there is no cap on how long or how many, and it is entirely ordinary.

Whether to agree turns on one question, which is what the officer is waiting for. If the recommendation is going to be positive and the report needs writing, or a consultee is late, refusing to extend buys nothing at all. If nobody will say what is outstanding, that is a different answer.

What gets missed is the price. Two things fall away with an agreement. The right of appeal that arises once the period expires undetermined moves to the new date, so the pressure comes off. And the application fee, which is refunded where a non-major application passes sixteen weeks undetermined or any other application passes twenty-six, is not refunded at all where an extension has been agreed in writing.

Almost everything that puts an application in that position was settled before it was submitted. The validation list met in full, the surveys commissioned in their season rather than in answer to a holding objection, the points a consultee will raise answered in the documents rather than afterwards. None of that shortens a statutory period. It removes the reasons a period gets extended.

The practical protection is to agree a short extension rather than an open one, and to ask in writing what specifically is outstanding. A dated answer is easier to hold an authority to than an open-ended one, and it tells you whether the delay is administrative or whether something substantive has gone wrong.

Appealing against non-determination is rarely the fastest route to a building. It takes the scheme away from the authority you have been negotiating with and hands it to an inspector, who will decide the application that was submitted rather than the one the negotiation was heading towards.

The two routes also close against each other. Once notice of appeal has gone in no extension can be agreed at all, and lodging that appeal before the period has expired forfeits the fee refund as surely as agreeing an extension would have done.

Common questions

Planning timescales, answered

What can I do if the council misses the deadline?

Once the statutory period, or any extension agreed in writing, has passed without a decision, there is a right of appeal against non-determination.

Notice of that appeal has to be given within six months of the date the period expired. A trap sits in that sentence: the twelve-week deadline people associate with householder appeals applies only to an appeal against a decision, so a householder whose application was never decided has six months, not twelve weeks. Sitting alongside the appeal right is the planning guarantee, which is a policy rather than a statutory limit: no application should spend more than a year with decision-makers, and in practice a major application should be decided inside twenty-six weeks and a non-major one inside sixteen. The fee refund that goes with those two periods is not policy at all. That one is in the fees regulations.

Is a resolution to grant the same as planning permission?

No. A resolution to grant is a decision to issue a permission once something outside the committee room is settled, most often a section 106 agreement.

Until the notice issues there is nothing to build against, nothing to discharge conditions under, and the three years in which development has to begin have not started. The gap is not a formality either. A section 106 is a contract, and everyone with an interest in the land has to sign it, so a lender, a freeholder or an option holder can each hold completion up, and none of them is in the council's gift to hurry. Where a scheme is likely to need an agreement, the drafting is work that can begin while the application is still being determined rather than after the vote.

How long do the ecology surveys take?

Longer than most programmes allow, because several of them can only be carried out at one time of year.

A preliminary appraisal of a building or a site can be done in any month. What it recommends often cannot. Bat emergence surveys, great crested newt surveys and breeding bird surveys each have a season, and a season missed is a year lost rather than a fortnight. That makes ecology the first thing to commission and the last thing to leave until an officer asks for it, because it is the only part of an application whose timing is not negotiable with anybody.

How long is planning permission valid once it is granted?

Three years from the date on the decision notice, unless the notice itself sets a different period.

The development has to be begun inside that period, not finished, and beginning it means carrying out a material operation on the site. Once it has lawfully begun the permission does not lapse. Outline permission runs to two deadlines rather than one: the reserved matters have to be applied for within three years, and the development begun within two years of the last of them being approved. Since February 2026 a permission caught up in a legal challenge has its period extended while the proceedings run. And the clock starts at the notice, which is why the difference between a resolution and a notice is worth knowing.

How long does it take to discharge a planning condition?

Eight weeks. It is a separate application with its own fee and its own clock, and it runs after consent rather than inside it.

Pre-commencement conditions are the ones that matter to a programme, because nothing can lawfully start on site until they are discharged. Where an authority does not respond in time there is a deemed discharge route for many conditions, but it is narrower than it sounds: it cannot be triggered in the first six weeks, it needs a written notice of its own, and a long list of conditions is excluded from it. The useful move is earlier than any of that. Ask at application stage which conditions are likely to be imposed, and submit the evidence for them with the application.

How long does a planning appeal take?

Median times published by the Planning Inspectorate are eighteen weeks by written representations, twenty-three by hearing and twenty-six by inquiry.

Those medians are measured from the point the Inspectorate accepts the appeal as valid to the day the decision letter issues, so the time spent preparing the appeal sits on top of them, and so does the wait for it to be validated. An appeal is rarely the fastest route to a building, and it is not a second attempt: an inspector decides the scheme that is on the file, not a revised one.

What is a planning performance agreement?

A written agreement with the authority setting a bespoke timetable for a larger application, in place of the statutory period.

The authority charges for it and commits in return to named officers, a project plan and dates for each stage. It is worth having where a scheme is big enough that eight or thirteen weeks was never realistic, and where knowing when the decision arrives is worth more than the fee. It also changes how a council's published performance reads, because a decision made inside an agreement is counted as made on time in the national figures.

How long does a pre-application enquiry take?

There is no statutory period for one, so it depends entirely on the authority and on what is asked of it.

Most authorities publish a target in the charging schedule that goes with the service, measured in weeks rather than days, and a written response usually takes longer than a meeting. It runs before the application, so it shortens no statutory clock at all. What it does is settle the arguments that would otherwise be had inside the clock, which is the only reliable way to stop a period being extended.

Written by

Rickett Architects

A RIBA Chartered practice, working since 1970, with more than 2,500 projects behind it. Our senior architects take projects from first survey through planning to completion, for private clients, developers and landowners across the Midlands and well beyond it.