English planning application fees increase on 1st April 2026
At Planning Portal, we’re committed to empowering our applicants with clear, reliable information to help them make informed decisions. With this in mind, we’d like to let you know about the forthcoming annual fee increase – affecting planning application fees in England. This increase is set by government and linked to the consumer price index. Changes will take affect from 1 April 2026.
What are the new fees?
To help you get familiar with the new planning application fees, we have produced a forthcoming version of our fee schedule , which shows the current and new fees side-by-side.
Based on the Consumer Price Index 12-month rate for September 2025, the increase will be 3.8%, rounded to the nearest whole pound.
How Planning Portal is supporting you
We’re keen to ensure all our applicants understand their obligations, so we’ll be sharing more information, and reminders, about the forthcoming changes in the built up to implementation.
Updates to our system:
To ensure our service remains compliant, accurate and aligned with the latest changes, our fee calculator will be updated to reflect the new values.
To enable this transition, we will have an outage at the close of business on the last working day that the current fees are in place (from 17:00 on Tuesday 31st March 2026) to apply the changes and ensure that any submissions after that point adheres to the new fee values.
This is in line with the legislation for online submission of applications (see paragraph 6): “Where the electronic communication is received by the recipient outside the recipient’s business hours, it is taken to have been received on the next working day.”
Where possible, for applications that have not been submitted, we will reset any existing fee calculations. This will help ensure that fees are recalculated using the increased values for applications submitted after the change takes effect, ensuring correct and valid amounts are received by the local authority.
What this means for applicants and their agents
As per the detail above, applications that are not submitted prior to the change (by the close of business, 17:00 on Tuesday 31 March 2026), will be subject to the increased fees.
For users of the Planning Portal, this includes any applications that are in draft or that have not had their payment completed (including nominated payments, or where bank transfers or cheques have not yet been processed).
Our submission notification emails have a ‘Submitted date’ field that can be used to evidence when the submission took place.
If you have existing applications for submission in England, then their status will dictate the actions required when we update the system.
If an application is in ‘draft’ status
We will reset any draft fee calculations to ensure that applications are submitted with the correct fees, giving them the best chance of being validated.
You will need to recalculate the fee before you can complete the application and start the ‘pay and submit’ process.
If an application is in ‘payment pending’ status
If an application is already complete and has begun the ‘pay and submit’ process, then payment will need to be received and cleared by us before 17:00 on Tuesday 31st March 2026.
Otherwise, the payment process will be cancelled, the fee calculation reset, and the application returned to ‘draft’ status. You will then need to recalculate the fee and begin the ‘pay and submit’ process again.
If you or your nominated party are paying by bank transfer or cheque, please use the following guidelines:
- Bank transfer – While some transfers can clear within a working day, we recommend initiating payments no later than Wednesday 25th March 2026.
- Cheque – Please ensure cheques reach us by Friday 20th March 2026 (i.e. allowing additional time for delivery)
The Planning Portal cannot be held responsible for any failure to meet the stated submission deadlines. Annex A of our payment service terms and conditions state the time periods for clearance of funds.
If an application is in ‘submitted’ or ‘received’ status
If they have not done so already, the local planning authority will review the application once it is in their system and then confirm if any additional fee is due as part of their validation checks.
What this means for local authorities
Depending how each local authority retrieves applications and processes fees from Planning Portal, there will be different periods between the time of submission and the time the applications and payments are shown in their systems.
In the case of any confusion, our submission notification emails include a ‘Submitted date’ field, which can be used to confirm when a submission took place and determine which fees apply.
Therefore:
If the application was submitted prior to the change (before close of business, 17:00 on Tuesday 31st March 2026), you will see these applications arrive with the fees that were correct at the time of submission. These should be accepted as valid.
You should expect applications submitted after the change takes place to arrive with the new fees.
If you feel the fee for any application is incorrect, you can contact the applicant/agent (and us as required) to request an adjusted payment as per existing validation practises.
Keeping you informed
We hope the above provides clarity on the upcoming fee changes and associated processes. At Planning Portal, we’re committed to ensuring our users have early access to all the information they need, helping them prepare for any changes and making these transitions as smooth as possible.
We will continue to inform and remind users of the changes, including submission deadlines, across our platform to support a smooth transition in the run-up to implementation. If you have any questions, please refer to the FAQs below.
Frequently asked questions
Please see these FAQs for further details on specific queries about fee changes:
Planning Portal Blog 