How Much Does a Planning Application Cost?

The planning fee is fixed by national regulations rather than set by Colchester City Council, it is a flat sum for a householder application whatever size the extension is, and it rises every April. Any figure printed on a webpage therefore has a shelf life of about a year, which is why the number worth having is the one on the council’s own fee page or the Planning Portal on the day you submit.

What does not change annually is the structure: what the fee is charged on, which applications cost a fraction of it, which cost nothing at all, and how small a part of the bill it is.

The fee does not scale with the extension

One flat charge covers work within the curtilage of a single house, whatever the floor area.

A householder application is charged as a single flat fee. A 12 square metre porch and a 60 square metre wrap around attract the same one, and adding another two metres of depth at design stage costs nothing in fee terms. That is unusual among statutory charges and it runs the opposite way to the building control charge, which is banded by the floor area of the new work and does go up.

The practical consequence is worth taking seriously. If the design is marginal, the fee gives you no reason at all to submit the smaller version. The reasons to do that are planning ones, and they belong to the drawings rather than to the invoice.

Why it moves every April

Planning fees have been index linked since 2025, on a formula rather than at a minister’s discretion.

Fees payable on or after 1 April each year are increased in line with the consumer prices index, using the September figure against the previous September, capped at 10 per cent and rounded to the nearest pound. The increase applies to applications made on or after the change date, so an application submitted in late March is charged at the old rate and the same one submitted in April is not.

Nobody should reorganise a project around that. It matters because it means every fee figure you find in an article, a forum post or a builder’s quotation from last year is wrong by construction, and the error is always in the same direction.

What the other applications cost, relative to it

Most of the neighbouring charges are expressed as a proportion of the planning fee, so the ratios stay true when the numbers do not.

• A Lawful Development Certificate for proposed work is half the fee that would be payable for a planning application for the same work. Cheap insurance for something you are entitled to build anyway.
• A certificate for work already carried out is charged at the full planning fee, not half. The discount is for asking first.
• Prior approval under the larger home extension route carries its own fixed fee, well below a householder application, which is one of several reasons it is worth establishing whether the route is open before designing past it.
• Discharging conditions is charged per request rather than per condition, at a lower householder rate. Two separate requests cost twice, so conditions get bundled into one submission wherever the wording allows.
• A non material amendment after permission is granted carries a small fixed fee. A material one is a fresh application at the full rate.
• Listed building consent carries no fee of its own. That says nothing about the cost of preparing it.

The exemption people still expect, and the one that is really there

There is no longer any fee concession for an application you only need because a right was taken away.

Where the work would have been permitted development, and the only reason you need permission is that the right has been removed by an Article 4 direction or by a condition imposed on an earlier planning permission, the ordinary householder fee is payable. An exemption for exactly that situation did exist, which is why so much guidance still promises one, but it was repealed in England on 17 January 2018.

The condition half of that is the part that catches people out. Estate housing built from the 1980s onwards very often carries a condition on the original estate permission removing permitted development rights, and it is common across Stanway, Myland and Highwoods. The house in an older street builds the same thing with no application and no fee; you pay both. Whether the condition applies to your address is a question for the planning history rather than for the deeds, and it takes minutes to check.

The exemption that does survive is a narrow one. No fee is payable where the application relates solely to work altering or extending a house to provide access, or facilities for the safety, health or comfort of a disabled resident. That is decided by the council on the facts of the application, and it is worth raising rather than waiting to be offered.

The free resubmission has gone too

There used to be a free go: one further application of the same character on the same site, made without a fee after a refusal or a withdrawal. The exemptions were revoked in December 2023. A resubmission after a refusal now carries a second full fee, which changes the arithmetic of what to do about a refusal and makes the first submission worth more care than it used to be.

The fee is the small number

What the application really costs sits in the work that produces it.

The measured survey and the drawings are the largest line at this stage, and they scale with the building rather than with the extension. A rambling period cottage takes longer to measure and draw than a 1960s semi having the same work done to it.

Then whatever the council’s local validation list requires for your address: a design and access or heritage statement in a conservation area, an arboricultural report where a protected tree is close enough to matter, drainage details on a constrained site. Those are real costs and they are not optional, because a submission missing one of them does not get validated. Pre-application advice, where a marginal scheme justifies it, has a published charge of its own.

The structural engineer is not on this list. Beams, padstones and foundation design are for Building Control rather than for planning, and that work usually comes after the route is settled.

The most expensive line is the one nobody quotes

An invalid application costs weeks. A refusal costs a redesign, a second full fee and another determination period, and on a job with a fixed start date it costs more than either of those in dead programme. Set against that, the difference between a careful submission and a rushed one is not really a fee question at all.

Statutory fees are uprated annually and the exemptions are revised from time to time. Treat the structure above as reliable and confirm any figure for your own application against the review date at the foot of this page.

Last reviewed August 2026.