The honest answer is that it depends enormously on which council you lodge with — far more than most people expect. We measured every development application determined across New South Wales in the last twelve months.
That single figure hides the thing that actually matters: the council. In the slowest it is 118 days, for the same kind of application.
Why the "average DA time" you read elsewhere is usually wrong
Most published figures mix every kind of application together, and that produces a number that describes a council's workload mix rather than its speed.
| Application type | Median | Determined in 12 months |
|---|---|---|
| Development Application | 56 days | 40,828 |
| Complying Development Certificate | 4 days | 37,164 |
| Modification Application | 37 days | 12,444 |
| All types combined | 28 days | 94,333 |
A Complying Development Certificate is determined in a median of 4 days because it is a compliance check against fixed standards, not a merit assessment. A real development application takes 56. A council that processes a lot of CDCs will therefore post an excellent combined figure while its DAs take just as long as anyone else's.
This is why the combined number is misleading. Across NSW the all-types median is 28 days. For actual development applications it is 56. If you are comparing councils, compare like with like — every figure on this page is development applications only.
How long a DA takes, by council
Councils with at least 50 determined development applications in the last twelve months, so the median means something. 110 of the 128 NSW councils clear that bar.
Slowest
| Council | Region | Median | Determined |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liverpool City Council | Greater Sydney | 118 days | 475 |
| Warrumbungle Shire Council | Central West and Orana | 101 days | 77 |
| Hunters Hill Council | Greater Sydney | 100 days | 110 |
| Yass Valley Council | South East and Tablelands | 99 days | 255 |
| Gunnedah Shire Council | New England North West | 98 days | 88 |
| Tweed Shire Council | North Coast | 97 days | 629 |
| Sutherland Shire Council | Greater Sydney | 92 days | 646 |
| Ku-ring-gai Council | Greater Sydney | 90 days | 366 |
| Woollahra Municipal Council | Greater Sydney | 88 days | 406 |
| Cumberland City Council | Greater Sydney | 88 days | 520 |
| City of Ryde | Greater Sydney | 88 days | 243 |
Source: NSW Planning Portal, determined development applications in the last twelve months, measured by Lodgd. Median is the middle value — half of applications were faster, half slower. Councils with fewer than 50 determinations are excluded because a median over a handful of applications is noise rather than a pattern.
What actually drives the difference
A slow median is not automatically a badly run council, and a fast one is not automatically efficient. The things that move the number:
- What is being lodged. A council seeing mostly single dwellings and alterations will determine faster than one assessing apartment buildings and mixed-use towers, whatever its processes.
- Requests for further information. The statutory clock stops while an applicant prepares what was asked for, but the calendar does not — and these medians are measured on the calendar, lodgement to determination. A large share of long assessments are applications that sat waiting on the applicant.
- Referrals. Applications needing input from another agency — heritage, Transport for NSW, the Rural Fire Service, water — wait on that agency.
- Panels. Applications going to a local or regional planning panel are bound by that panel's meeting cycle.
- Volume against staffing. A council determining several hundred DAs a year with a small assessment team will queue.
The practical use of the number is comparison, not judgement: if you are choosing between sites in two council areas, a 120-day difference in the median is a real difference in holding costs.
The statutory clock is not the same as the real one
New South Wales sets assessment periods after which an applicant may treat an application as refused and appeal — the "deemed refusal" period. That period is a right to appeal, not a deadline the council must meet, and the figures above show how far the two diverge in practice. Most applicants wait rather than appeal, because appealing restarts the process somewhere more expensive.