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.
Before you lodge: is a DA even the right path?
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.
- Exempt development — minor work that needs no approval at all, provided it meets the standards set for it. A small deck, a garden shed under a certain size, internal work that does not affect the structure.
- Complying development — straightforward work that meets fixed, pre-set standards. It is approved through a Complying Development Certificate rather than a DA, and can be issued by a council or a private certifier. Far faster, because it is a compliance check rather than a judgement call.
- Local development — everything else that a council assesses on its merits. This is what a DA is for.
- State significant development — large or strategically important projects assessed by the State rather than the council.
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. (The last twelve months, over 37,164 certificates and 40,828 applications.) 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 a DA package contains
What you lodge varies with the scale of the proposal, but a typical package includes:
- The application form and the owner's consent
- A Statement of Environmental Effects — the written argument for why the development is acceptable, assessed against the relevant planning controls
- Architectural drawings: site plan, floor plans, elevations, sections
- A survey of the existing site
- Shadow diagrams, where overshadowing of neighbours is in question
- A cost of works estimate, which sets the application fee
- Specialist reports where triggered — heritage, traffic, acoustic, bushfire, flooding, contamination, arborist, stormwater
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.
Lodgement
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.
Notification and exhibition
Councils notify neighbours and often advertise the application, giving people a period to make a submission. This changed on 1 September 2026. A single statewide Community Participation Plan now replaces the hundred-plus separate council plans, standardising exhibition and notification timeframes across NSW. Applications lodged before that date keep the rules that applied when they were lodged, so both regimes are in play for a while yet.
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.
Assessment
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:
- A request for additional information. The officer asks for something missing or unclear, and the application waits until it arrives. The statutory assessment clock stops while it waits — under the Regulation the assessment period ceases to run between the day the request is issued and the day you answer it. The calendar does not stop, though, and the figures on this page are measured from the published lodgement date to the published determination date, so that waiting is in every number you see here.
- Referrals. Applications touching heritage, main roads, bushfire-prone land, waterways or contaminated land go to another agency for input, and return on that agency's schedule.
Determination
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, or refusal. Which is most common is not something anyone can tell you from the public record — 98% of the development applications NSW published as determined in the last twelve months carry the status "Determined" and nothing else, so the outcome is simply not stated. Conditions attach obligations to the consent: what must be done before construction starts, during it, and before the building can be occupied.
How long all of this takes
The spread around that median is wide. Of the development applications determined in NSW in the last twelve months, 27% were decided inside 30 days and 2% took longer than a year. Which council you are in matters more than almost anything else: among councils determining at least 50 a year, the median runs from about a week to about four months.
Beware the figure that counts everything together. Put development applications, complying development certificates and modifications in one pot and 52% look like they are decided inside 30 days. That number is real, but it is describing NSW's mix of application types, not the speed of a DA — complying certificates are more than a third of the total and their median is 4 days. For a development application the honest figure is 27%.
See the full council-by-council breakdown →
If it is refused
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.