How many planning applications get approved, and where

Across every council we collect, 25,237 planning applications were approved and 3,318 were refused in the last 90 days. That is an approval rate of 88.4%. A further 1,224 were withdrawn and 2,850 ended in something that is neither a yes nor a no. Measured — counted from the councils' own registers

What we mean by "approved"

Approval rate here is approvals divided by approvals plus refusals — the decisions that were actually determined. Withdrawn applications are excluded from the bottom of that sum, because an applicant who changes his mind has not been refused, and counting him as one would push a council's rate down by something that has nothing to do with the council. "Other" — prior approvals, split decisions, consultee responses and the residue every register carries — is excluded for the same reason: it is not a yes or a no.

Both excluded counts are printed above rather than hidden, so you can put them back if you disagree with where we drew the line.

Some figures we will not publish, and why

Before the league tables, the thing we found while building this page. 13 of the councils we collect have never recorded a single refusal — not just in the last 90 days, but in the entire history we hold for them. Every one of them therefore sits at exactly 100%, and none of them appears in any approval-rate figure below. Measured

A council with no refusal on record has an approval rate we cannot tell apart from a bug, so we do not rank it either way. But a zero is not evidence of anything on its own: it has to be read against how many decisions it is a zero out of. At the national refusal rate of 12.0%, never seeing a refusal in twenty decisions is a one-in-eleven coincidence, and never seeing one in a hundred and sixty is not. So we split them.

7 we have simply not watched for long enough

These are small registers, recently collected, or both. Their zero is ordinary arithmetic and we expect most of them to record a refusal and rejoin the tables on their own.

• Shetland Islands 30 determined, 0 refused
• South Tyneside 27 determined, 0 refused
• Falkirk 22 determined, 0 refused
• Stirling 21 determined, 0 refused
• West Dunbartonshire 21 determined, 0 refused
• Fife 21 determined, 0 refused
• North Devon 20 determined, 0 refused

6 where the zero is hard to explain

Here the sample is large enough that chance is a poor explanation, so one of three other things is true: the council's register does not publish refusals in the list we read, our reader does not recognise the wording it uses for one, or the register is genuinely not permission-shaped — the City of London's, for instance, is mostly discharges of conditions and non-material amendments on schemes already consented.

• the City of London 160 determined, 0 refused
• Broxtowe 68 determined, 0 refused
• Fermanagh and Omagh 57 determined, 0 refused
• Newry, Mourne and Down 46 determined, 0 refused
• Mid and East Antrim 43 determined, 0 refused
• North Ayrshire 39 determined, 0 refused

Decision times and decision counts are not affected for any of them, and they still appear in those tables: a register we have not yet read a refusal off still tells us truthfully when it validated an application and when it decided it.

We checked rather than assumed. Barnsley, Falkirk, North Ayrshire and Fermanagh and Omagh all publish their refusals, and when we went and read their registers ourselves our reader got every one of them right; they are on this list because we have not collected enough of their weeks yet, not because we are misreading them. If you work at one of these councils and think we have your register wrong, we would like to know.

Where the councils sit

A national average of nine in ten hides the question that actually matters, which is whether councils cluster round it or spread. They cluster, but not tightly: 243 councils determined at least 20 applications in the window and have a refusal on record, and this is how their approval rates fall.

Across those 243 councils alone the approval rate is 88.0% — the figure at the top of this page, 88.4%, includes the 13 registers we cannot read refusals off and is therefore very slightly flattering. 88.0% is the number to quote. Measured

Approval rates, council by council

Two bars to appear below: at least 20 applications determined in the window, and at least one refusal on record ever. A council with four decisions sits at 100% or 75% and nothing in between; a council with no refusals at all sits at exactly 100% whether it is a lenient council, a small one, or one whose register we are misreading. A league table topped by either kind of arithmetic is worse than no league table.

How long a decision takes

Measured from the date the council validated the application to the date it decided it, as a median rather than a mean — one application that sat for three years would drag an average somewhere no applicant would recognise. Nationally the median is 58 days; the statutory target for a householder application is eight weeks. Measured

Extensions and house work specifically

Most people asking this question mean householder work — an extension, a loft, a garage conversion — rather than a supermarket or a wind farm. Filtered to the applications our classifier reads as residential, the last 90 days hold 12,166 determined decisions, of which 10,513 were approved and 1,653 refused — an approval rate of 86.4%. Measured

Two things about that figure rather than one. Residential work is approved at a slightly lower rate than the national average, and it takes 63 days to decide against 58 across everything — so the intuition that a small domestic job is the quick, easy one is not what the registers say.

The residential split is our own classifier reading the proposal text, not a category the councils publish. It is a good guide and it is not a legal definition; a proposal worded unusually can land on the wrong side of it. Measured — by our classifier, not by the council

Busiest councils

What this is a count of, and what it is not

This is a count of what we hold, not a national statistic. The decisions above came from 323 councils. There are 388 planning authorities on our register and we publish a page for 368 of them, so this covers a large part of the country and not all of it, and it is weighted towards the councils we collect most reliably. Measured for the count; Declared for the registry total

It is also current in a way an official release is not. These figures cover the last 90 days and are recounted weekly from the registers themselves. Nothing here is modelled, seasonally adjusted or projected.

We publish no applicant's name, address or postcode on this page or on any other public page, whatever the figures say. What was proposed and what was decided is public record; who applied and where they live is not ours to give away.