How much does planning permission cost? The 2026 council fees

Why the planning permission fee keeps changing

Planning fees in England used to sit still for years at a time, which is why so many cost guides are wrong. That changed in 2023: regulations introduced automatic annual indexation, and since 1 April 2025 the fee schedule has risen every April in line with the previous September's Consumer Prices Index, capped at 10% and never falling. The 1 April 2026 uprating was 3.8%, tracking CPI from September 2025.

The practical consequence is that any figure you read without a stated effective date is untrustworthy. The householder fee was £258 as recently as 2024; it is £548 today. Guides quoting the older number are not slightly stale — they understate the cost by more than half, and homeowners budgeting from them get an unpleasant surprise at submission.

One quirk worth knowing: the government has acknowledged that a defect in the 2026 regulations left the outline-application fee covering multiple categories un-indexed, and intends to correct it. It does not affect householder work, but it is a useful reminder that the schedule is a legal instrument rather than a tariff — read it, and do not assume every line moved by the same percentage.

What does the planning permission fee actually pay for?

The fee buys a decision, not an approval — and this is the single most misunderstood thing about it. Paying £548 entitles you to have your application validated, consulted on, assessed by a case officer and determined within the statutory eight weeks. It does not entitle you to a yes. A refusal consumes the fee exactly as an approval does.

It also does not buy the drawings. Every householder application must arrive with a site location plan, a block plan, and existing and proposed floor plans and elevations at recognised scales — and the council will not validate the application without them. Preparing that package is a separate cost from the statutory fee, which is why a quote that folds the two together is telling you less than it appears to. The council's charge is fixed by law and identical everywhere; the drawing work is not.

There is one genuine consolation. If your application is refused, you can submit one revised application free of charge within 12 months of the decision, provided it is for substantially the same development on the same site. That free-go provision is why a considered redesign usually beats an immediate appeal, and why the real cost of a refusal is measured in months rather than in application fees.

Will I have to pay the Community Infrastructure Levy?

Probably not — but if you do, it dwarfs the application fee, and the rules punish paperwork errors far more harshly than they punish size. CIL is a charge levied by many London boroughs on new floorspace. It bites on development of 100m² gross internal area or more, and on any new dwelling regardless of floor area. A typical rear extension or loft conversion falls under the 100m² threshold and is exempt as minor development, so most homeowners never encounter it at all.

The danger is in the exemption process, not the threshold. Relief for a larger extension or an annexe is not granted automatically because you qualify: you must submit the correct claim form and receive the council's acknowledgement *before development commences*. Start work first — even digging foundations — and the relief is lost. The full levy becomes payable on a scheme that was always eligible for nothing to be paid at all.

This is not a hypothetical. In June 2026 the government wrote to CIL charging authorities acknowledging that householders who met every qualifying criterion but missed a procedural step have been issued full levy bills, and that escalated enforcement — including threats of forced sale and criminal proceedings — has had serious consequences for families. Ministers are reforming the regulations and have asked authorities to use discretion in hardship cases. Until that lands, the rule stands: if your scheme approaches 100m², claim the exemption and get it acknowledged in writing before anyone lifts a spade.

The cheapest planning application is the one that gets approved

Because the fee is flat and national, it is the one part of your budget you cannot optimise. You cannot shop around for a cheaper council, and a modest scheme pays exactly what an ambitious one pays. What you can control is how many times you pay it — and that is decided entirely by the quality of what you submit.

An application refused for reasons that a competent designer would have anticipated costs you the free resubmission, three to four months of programme, and often the summer you meant to build in. An application returned as invalid costs less but stings more, because the clock never started. Both failure modes trace back to the same root: a package assembled to look like a planning application rather than one assembled against the council's own validation checklist and its written design policies. We prepare and submit that package, handle the case officer, and revise free until you have a decision — and we calculate and pay the correct statutory fee as part of the submission, so the category confusion above never becomes your problem.