UK Planning Applications — Search, Monitor & Trade Leads

Search and monitor planning applications from 400+ UK councils (England, Scotland, Wales & NI) in one place — with built-in trade-lead classification that turns raw applications into scored, actionable leads for builders, roofers, scaffolders, solar installers, landscapers and other trades.

Backed by a stable HTTP API aggregating official council planning portals — no brittle browser scraping, no logins, no proxies.

What you get for each application

Field	Example
council, reference, address, postcode	Manchester, 138756/FH/2026, 12 Acacia Ave, M20 4XX
description	"Erection of a single storey rear extension and loft conversion with dormer"
state / applicationType / size	Undecided / Full / Small
startDate, decidedDate, consultationEndDate	2026-08-01
latitude / longitude	53.43 / -2.23
councilUrl	Direct link to the application on the council portal
tradeTags	extension-builder, loft-conversion, scaffolding:implied, roofing:implied
leadScore (0–100) + leadRationale	75 — "live application — early pipeline signal; matches trade keywords; medium-value project"
valueBand, projectCategory	medium / residential-improvement

Use cases

• Tradespeople & contractors: find homeowners about to start extensions, lofts, roofs, driveways — filter minLeadScore: 60 and appState: ["Permitted"] for work that's approved and imminent.
• Building-product & service suppliers: scaffolding, skip hire, glazing, kitchens — use implied-trade tags to catch jobs that will need you even when the description doesn't say so.
• Solar & renewables installers: searchText: "solar panel" or photovoltaic or "heat pump".
• Property & land intelligence: monitor competitor developers with developer searches; track approvals by area.
• AI agents & workflows: clean JSON, stable schema, monitor mode with dedupe — drop it into a scheduled workflow and pipe new leads to Slack/email/CRM via Apify integrations.

Modes

• Search — one-off query: councils/areas + keywords + date ranges + postcode radius.
• Monitor — designed for scheduled runs: remembers every application it has returned and only outputs new or changed ones. Set it to run daily and you have a planning-alert engine.

Example input

{
    "areas": ["Manchester", "Trafford", "Stockport"],
    "mode": "monitor",
    "tradeTagging": true,
    "minLeadScore": 60,
    "appState": ["Undecided", "Permitted"]
}

Pricing

Pay per result: a small fee per application found, plus a small fee per application classified with trade tags & lead score. No subscription. Turn tradeTagging off if you only want raw data.

Reliability & fair use

Data comes from PlanIt (planit.org.uk), a long-running aggregator of official UK council planning portals, accessed with paced, rate-limit-respecting requests. Some councils' data can lag or go stale upstream; the lastChanged field tells you data freshness. Applicant personal names are not included in the data (data-protection safe) — applications are about properties and proposals.

FAQ

Which councils are covered? 400+ UK planning authorities. Use any council name ("Leeds", "Hackney"), region ("London"), or nation ("Scotland").

How fresh is the data? Most active councils are checked daily upstream. Monitor mode + daily scheduled runs typically surfaces new applications within 24–48h of council publication.

Is this legal? Planning applications are public information published by councils for public consultation. This actor returns property/proposal data and omits personal applicant details.