English planning application fees increase on 8th December 2026
This increase is set by government to ensure local authorities can recover at least 90% of their costs when determining applications.
Changes are due to take affect from 8 December 2026, once the legislation has gained parliamentary approval.
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.
The fees were informed by benchmarking research carried out by the Planning Advisory service in August 2025 as part of their wider work on national and localised planning fees.
Full details can be reviewed in the legislation, with further context provided by the explanatory memorandum and impact assessment
These increases set the national baseline fee values, with government planning to introduce local variation of fees for the 2027/2028 financial year. The national fees will still also be subject to the annual inflationary increase on the 1st April each year.
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 Monday 7th December 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 Monday 7th December 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 Monday 7th December 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 2 December 2026.
- Cheque – Please ensure cheques reach us by 27 November 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.
If the application was submitted prior to the change (before close of business, 17:00 on Monday 7th December 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 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:
- How do government application fee changes affect online application submissions?
- I’ve been nominated to pay for a planning application, but the fees are changing?
- What actions are required if users or their nominees had their payment processes cancelled due to government application fee changes?
- How are fees and payments for amendments handled when government changes fees?
- What information is published regarding government application fee changes?
