How Much Does Planning Permission Cost?

If you've typed this question into Google, you probably want a number. So here it is: a standard householder extension will cost you £548 in application fees. A full application for a small housing scheme starts at £610 per dwelling. An outline application on a larger site runs into the tens of thousands.

But if you're a developer, that fee is almost a rounding error. The real cost of getting planning permission, the bit that actually decides whether a scheme is worth pursuing, lives in the surveys, reports, and professional fees around the application. This guide covers both: the official fee schedule, and the full cost picture that most guides leave out entirely.

Key Highlights

• The householder planning application fee is £548 (from 1st April 2026), with full and outline applications charged per dwelling or per hectare.
• Application fees are non-refundable, whether your scheme is approved or refused.
• For developers, the statutory fee is the smallest line in the budget. Professional fees, technical reports and pre-commencement costs typically dwarf it.
• Ecology, flood risk, transport, heritage and contamination reports can each run into thousands of pounds, and which ones you need depends entirely on the site.
• The Community Infrastructure Levy and Section 106 contributions, charged after permission is granted, are often the single biggest cost of all.
• Getting a handle on likely costs early, before you commit to a site, is what separates a scheme that stacks up from one that doesn't.

The Short Answer

Planning application fees in England are set nationally by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and they're reviewed each April in line with inflation. As things stand:

• A householder application (extending or altering a single house) costs £548.
• Works within the boundary of a dwelling, such as gates, fences or walls, cost £272.
• A full application for new dwellings costs £610 per dwelling for schemes under ten homes, rising to £659 per dwelling for ten to fifty homes, with a different formula above that.
• An outline application is charged per 0.1 hectare of site area, following a similar tiered structure.

So the honest answer to "how much does planning permission cost" is: it depends on what you're applying for, and the council fee is only ever the starting point.

That's the piece most cost guides skip. If you're renovating a kitchen extension, the fee genuinely is most of your planning budget. If you're bringing forward a development site, the application fee might be a few thousand pounds on a project where the reports, consultants and levies run into six figures. Both answers are correct. They're just answering different questions.

Planning Application Fees: The Official Fee Table 

Here's the current fee structure for the most common application types in England, correct as of April 2026 (fees rise annually in April, in line with CPI, under the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023).

A few things worth knowing before you rely on any of these figures:

• Fees change every April, and some categories (prior approval, discharge of conditions) are set to change again from December 2026 following recent regulation updates.
• A separate service charge applies if you submit through the Planning Portal, on top of the statutory fee.
• Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own fee schedules, entirely separate from England's.

Because of all that, treat this table as a guide rather than gospel, and run your specific application through the Planning Portal's fee calculator before you budget or submit.

The Costs Beyond the Fee: What Actually Decides a Scheme's Viability

This is the part that homeowner-focused guides rarely touch, and it's where the real budgeting happens if you're bringing forward a development site.

Professional Fees

Unless you're applying for a straightforward extension, you'll almost certainly need a planning consultant to manage the application and liaise with the local authority, an architect to produce drawings and design the scheme, and a surveyor to establish the site's boundaries, levels and existing structures. On anything beyond the smallest schemes, these three alone can easily outweigh the statutory application fee several times over.

Technical Reports and Surveys

What you need here depends entirely on the site, which is exactly why it catches people out. A council can, and often will, request any of the following before it will validate or determine an application:

• Ecology and biodiversity net gain assessments, now a legal requirement for most developments in England.
• Flood risk assessments, mandatory if the site sits in or near a flood zone.
• Transport and highways assessments, for schemes likely to generate meaningful traffic.
• Heritage statements, where a site sits within a conservation area or near a listed building.
• Arboriculture reports, where trees on or near the site are protected or significant.
• Contamination assessments, particularly relevant on former industrial or brownfield land.

Each of these is typically commissioned from a specialist consultant, and each can run into thousands of pounds on its own. A site that triggers four or five of them, which isn't unusual for anything beyond a straightforward infill plot, can rack up survey costs that dwarf the application fee before a single drawing has been submitted.

Pre-Application Advice

Most local planning authorities offer a pre-application service, where you pay a fee (typically a few hundred to a few thousand pounds, depending on scheme size) to get informal feedback from planning officers before you submit formally. It's optional, but it's often money well spent: it flags problems early, when they're cheap to fix, rather than after a formal refusal.

Pre-Commencement and Post-Permission Costs

Getting permission isn't the finish line. Before you can start work, you'll likely need to discharge conditions attached to the consent, each of which usually carries its own fee. Then there's the Community Infrastructure Levy, a charge levied per square metre of new floorspace to fund local infrastructure, and Section 106 obligations, which can include anything from affordable housing contributions to funding for schools and roads. CIL rates vary enormously by local authority, from under £50 per square metre in some boroughs to well over £200 in others, so it genuinely pays to check your specific authority's charging schedule rather than assume a national figure.

For a meaningful housing scheme, CIL and Section 106 combined are very often the single largest cost in the entire planning process, well ahead of the application fee and often ahead of the professional fees too.

How These Costs Feed a Development Appraisal

None of this matters in isolation. What matters is how these costs sit within your overall appraisal, because every pound spent on fees, reports and levies is a pound that comes off the price you can afford to pay for the land.

That's why the costs above need to be in your thinking from day one, not bolted on after you've already agreed a purchase price. A site that looks attractive on a per-acre basis can stop making sense the moment you factor in a full ecology survey, a flood risk assessment and a CIL liability that a neighbouring, better-located site wouldn't attract at all.

Assessing a site's constraints early, before you commit, is what lets you budget these costs with any accuracy. Understanding whether a site sits in a flood zone, a conservation area, or has protected trees on it tells you almost immediately which of the reports above you're likely to need, and roughly what they'll cost.

This is where LandInsight comes in: it helps you assess a site's constraints and build them into a viability appraisal before you buy, so the costs above aren't a nasty surprise halfway through the process, but a known quantity from the outset.

FAQs

• How much is the planning application fee for an extension?

A standard householder application (a single dwelling) costs £548. Works within the boundary, such as new gates or fences, cost £272.

• Do you have to pay if planning permission is refused?

Yes. Planning application fees are non-refundable, regardless of the outcome. Some councils offer a free resubmission within a set period if your first application is refused, but the original fee itself is not returned.

• How much does a planning consultant cost?

This varies significantly by scheme complexity and region, but expect anywhere from a few hundred pounds for a straightforward householder application to several thousand for a larger or contested scheme. It's worth getting quotes from a couple of consultants before committing.

• What is the cost of an outline application?

Outline applications are charged per 0.1 hectare of site area, on a tiered basis, currently starting at £610 per 0.1 hectare for sites under 0.5 hectares. Beyond the fee itself, outline applications for larger sites tend to carry the highest technical report costs, given their scale.

• Are there free routes to getting works approved?

Some smaller projects fall under permitted development rights and don't require a planning application, or its fee, at all. Pre-application advice, while not free, can also save money in the long run by avoiding a costly refusal.

The Real Number to Budget For

The council fee is the easy number, the one every search result will happily give you. The number that actually decides whether a scheme stacks up is everything around it: the surveys, the reports, the professional fees, and the levies that land after permission is granted.

LandTech helps you get ahead of all of it, assessing a site's constraints and building the real cost picture into your appraisal before you buy.

Book a Demo | Explore LandInsight

Related reading:

• How Much Does Planning Permission Cost? The Full Guide to the Planning Permission Process
• Five Tips to Cut Your CIL Liability 
• Permitted Development Rights: A Guide
• Development Appraisal Explained