A development application — a DA — is the request you make to a council for permission to carry out development: building something, changing a building, demolishing one, subdividing land, or changing how a property is used. It is the most common formal step in the New South Wales planning system, and the one most people encounter.
This guide walks the process from the decision to lodge through to a determination, and explains what is actually happening at each point.
Not all development needs a DA. New South Wales sorts development into broad categories, and the first real question is which one your project falls into.
The category decides the timeline more than anything else you control. A Complying Development Certificate is determined in a median of 4 days across NSW. A development application takes 56. If your project can be made to fit the complying development standards, that is usually the single biggest lever on how long it takes — see CDC or DA.
What you lodge varies with the scale of the proposal, but a typical package includes:
Which specialist reports are triggered depends on the site: its zone, its overlays, and what is around it. This is where applications most often stall before they have properly begun.
Development applications in New South Wales are lodged through the NSW Planning Portal rather than directly with the council. The Portal checks the submission is complete, and the council then accepts it or asks for what is missing.
An application is not "in" until it is accepted. Time spent going back and forth over a missing document is time the project is not being assessed, and it does not show up in any published assessment statistic.
Most councils notify neighbours and often advertise the application, giving people a period to make a submission. What gets notified, to whom, and for how long is set by each council's own policy, so it varies across the state.
Submissions matter in two ways. They raise issues the assessment officer must address, and in many councils a threshold number of objections is what sends an application to a panel rather than being determined by staff — which changes the timeline considerably.
An assessment officer works through the application against the relevant planning instruments: the Local Environmental Plan that sets zoning, height and floor space controls, the Development Control Plan that sets the detailed design standards, and any State policies that apply to the site.
Two things commonly extend this stage:
An application is determined by council staff under delegation, by a local or regional planning panel, or by the elected council, depending on its scale, its value, and how many objections it drew.
The outcomes are approval, approval with conditions — much the most common — or refusal. Conditions attach obligations to the consent: what must be done before construction starts, during it, and before the building can be occupied.
The spread around that median is wide. Of all applications determined in NSW in the last twelve months, 52% were done inside 30 days and 1% took longer than a year. Which council you are in matters more than almost anything else — the median ranges from 7 days to 127 depending on where you lodge.
See the full council-by-council breakdown →
A refusal is not necessarily the end. Depending on the circumstances an applicant may seek a review of the determination by the council, appeal to the Land and Environment Court, or lodge a fresh application addressing the reasons for refusal. Which of those makes sense depends heavily on why it was refused — a fixable design problem is a different situation from a fundamental conflict with the zoning.
Watch development applications where you work.
Lodgd
tracks every DA lodged in New South Wales and emails you when one appears in
the councils you care about — with the council's own assessment times
alongside it.