UK Planning Applications

Planning applications from every UK local authority in one feed, tagged by the type of work, with applicant and agent details attached.

🔍 What does UK Planning Applications do?

Planning data is normally scattered across more than 300 separate council portals, each with its own site and its own search. This Actor gives you the lot from a single search, as clean rows ready for a spreadsheet, a CRM or your own product.

Every application is classified by the kind of work proposed, so you can pull just the jobs you care about instead of filtering thousands of records yourself:

solar, extension, loft-conversion, new-dwelling, change-of-use, demolition, roofing, windows-doors, driveway-landscaping, trees, signage, listed-building, commercial

Ask for solar in the last 7 days within 10km of a postcode and you get exactly that.

🏛️ What the official route gives you, and what this adds

Planning applications are public by law, but the official register is council by council. GOV.UK's own service for finding planning decisions is a postcode lookup that sends you to your local council, and each of the 300 plus local planning authorities then runs its own portal with its own search, its own reference format and its own way of publishing applicant details. Answering one question across an area that spans council boundaries means repeating the search on every portal it touches, and there is no way to search them together from the official side.

This Actor gives you that missing cross-council search in one call: a postcode radius or a list of councils, a date window, and a work-type classification the councils do not provide at all, with every result as a clean row that links back to the council's own record. The applications themselves are the councils' published data, reached through the PlanIt aggregator described below.

📊 What data can I extract from planning applications?

One row per planning application:

Field	Description
🆔 reference	Planning reference at the council
🆔 uid	PlanIt unique id for the application
🆔 name	PlanIt name for the application
🏢 council	Council the application was made to
🏠 address	Postal address of the site as published
📍 postcode	UK postcode of the site
📍 latitude	Latitude of the site
📍 longitude	Longitude of the site
📄 description	Full text of what is being applied for
🏷️ opportunityTags	Work types detected, such as solar or extension
🏷️ applicationType	Application type as recorded by the council
🏷️ applicationState	Current state, such as Undecided or Permitted
🏷️ applicationSize	Size band of the application
📅 startDate	Date the application was received
📅 decidedDate	Date of the decision, when decided
🏷️ decision	Decision as recorded, when decided
📅 lastChanged	When the council last changed the record
🔢 dwellings	Number of dwellings, for residential applications
📍 ward	Electoral ward of the site
📍 parish	Parish of the site
👤 applicantName	Applicant as recorded
🏠 applicantAddress	Applicant address as recorded
👤 agentName	Agent handling the application, when any
🏢 agentCompany	Company of the agent
🏠 agentAddress	Agent address as recorded
👤 caseOfficer	Council case officer
🔗 documentsUrl	Application documents at the council
🔗 councilUrl	Application page at the council
🔗 planitUrl	Application page on PlanIt
⏱️ retrievedAt	When the row was collected, ISO 8601

Applicant and agent fields depend on what each council publishes, so they are not present on every record. Results are deduplicated within a run.

💡 Why scrape planning applications?

Solar and heat pump installers. Every approved or pending solar application in your area, with the property address.

Builders, roofers, window and extension firms. Homeowners with planning permission for the work you do, at the moment they are looking for a contractor.

Architects and planning consultants. Track which agents are winning work in your patch using the applicant and agent search.

Estate agents and property investors. Spot new dwellings, conversions and land coming forward before they hit the market.

🧭 Use cases

A solar installer pulling every solar application within 10km of the depot each Monday morning. opportunityTags set to solar, recentDays set to 7, scheduled weekly, straight into a sheet the sales team calls from.

A loft conversion firm finding homeowners who already have permission and now need a builder. loft-conversion with applicationState set to Permitted returns addresses where the decision has landed and the work has not started.

An architect checking which agents are winning applications in their patch before pitching. developerText with a rival practice's name shows every application they have filed across every council, with outcomes.

A house buyer checking what is proposed around a property before exchanging. The property's postcode with a 1km radius and a wide date window surfaces the extension next door and the 40 dwellings on the field behind.

A property investor watching for new dwelling applications in three specific councils. areas with the council names and opportunityTags set to new-dwelling, run monthly, shows land coming forward before it is marketed.

A parish councillor keeping the village informed. A weekly scheduled run on the parish postcode, delivered to a shared inbox through a webhook, replaces checking the council portal by hand.

🚀 How do I use UK Planning Applications?

1. Click Try for free.
2. Set a time window with recentDays, or an explicit startDate and endDate.
3. Set a place: a postcode with a radiusKm of 10 or below, or a comma separated list of council names in areas.
4. Narrow it with opportunityTags and applicationState, then set maxResults to cap the run.
5. Click Start, then download the results as JSON, CSV or Excel, or pull them from the API.

⬇️ Input

Set at least one of recentDays, startDate, areas, postcode, searchText or developerText.

{
  "recentDays": 90,
  "postcode": "BS1 4DJ",
  "radiusKm": 10,
  "opportunityTags": ["solar"],
  "maxResults": 500
}

Field	Type	Default	What it does
recentDays	integer	7	Applications from the last N days, 0 means today
startDate	string		Explicit start date, YYYY-MM-DD
endDate	string		Explicit end date, YYYY-MM-DD
areas	string		Comma separated council names, blank for all UK
postcode	string		Search around this postcode
radiusKm	integer	5	Radius around the postcode
opportunityTags	array		Only return these work types
applicationState	string		Undecided, Permitted, Rejected, Withdrawn or Conditions
maxResults	integer	500	Hard cap on billable results

Three further filters are available: applicationSize takes Small, Medium or Large, searchText does a free text search of the description, and developerText searches applicant and agent names and addresses.

⬆️ Output

Table view

Results arrive as an Applications table you can sort and filter in the Console, with the council, address, description, tags and decision status lined up for scanning.

JSON

A typical row:

{
  "reference": "26/12938/NMA",
  "council": "Bristol",
  "address": "Portwall Place, Portwall Lane, Redcliffe, Bristol BS1 6NA",
  "description": "Provision of additional floorspace at ground and roof levels.",
  "opportunityTags": ["solar"],
  "applicationState": "Undecided",
  "startDate": "2026-07-13",
  "planitUrl": "https://www.planit.org.uk/planapplic/Bristol/26/12938/NMA/"
}

Download it from the run as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it straight from the API.

Radius, and why a wide one fails

PlanIt's own data source gives up after 45 seconds and reports it as an error. A radius above roughly 10km crosses that line most of the time, whatever date range it is paired with. Measured against the same postcode:

Radius	Result
10km, 7 / 30 / 90 days	succeeds every time, around 42 seconds
20km, 7 / 30 / 90 days	times out five attempts out of six

The date range is not what costs the time, the radius is. A 90 day search at 10km returns fine. So keep the radius at 10 or below and run several searches around different postcodes rather than one wide one. The actor retries an upstream timeout, but each retry costs another 45 seconds, so it is not a substitute for a sensible radius.

Postcode formats

Type the postcode however you have it. All of these reach the same place:

BS1 4DJ      bs1 4dj      BS14DJ       bs14dj
BS1-4DJ      BS1.4DJ      "BS1 4DJ"    BS1 4DJ.

Case, spacing and surrounding punctuation are all normalised before the search runs. PlanIt itself rejects a postcode without its space, so this matters: it answers BS14DJ with "No location found" rather than resolving it.

GIR 0AA is handled as the special case it is. An outward code on its own, such as BS1, is passed through untouched rather than guessed at, and a full address is left alone so it can be matched as text.

Data source and fair use

Data comes from PlanIt, an independent service that aggregates UK local authority planning portals, and originates from the councils themselves. This Actor rate limits itself between requests. If you are pulling large volumes regularly, consider supporting PlanIt, since the service is free and volunteer run.

⏱️ How long does a run take?

Measured on real runs, so you know what normal looks like and can tell it apart from a run that has stalled.

Applications returned	Typical run time
100, one named area	about 9 seconds
200, one named area	9 to 13 seconds
500, every authority, last 7 days	about 55 seconds

A search by named area is the fast route, because PlanIt already indexes applications by authority and the Actor just pages the result. A search by postcode and radius is the slow one: the point has to be resolved and a bounding area scanned before anything can be filtered, and 40 applications within 10 km of a Bristol postcode has been measured at 56 to 107 seconds. That is the same shape as the warning elsewhere in this README that a wide radius fails rather than merely being slow, so keep radiusKm tight and prefer areas where you can name the council.

Adding opportunityTags, a state, a size or a text filter does not slow a run down. Those are applied to applications that were fetched anyway, so they usually shorten it by ending the paging sooner. The first few seconds of any run are the container starting rather than the work.

A run is never silently stuck. Each page of applications is logged as it is read, and if a run reaches its time limit it stops early, keeps every application already collected and says how far it got in the status message.

Set the run timeout to suit the size of the ask. This Actor's default is 3600 seconds, which is comfortably more than the largest run in the table above (500 applications takes about 1 minute). You are charged per delivered result rather than per minute, so a generous timeout costs you nothing and a tight one risks losing the run's work. Lower it only if you want a hard ceiling on how long a scheduled run may sit.

💰 How much does it cost?

You pay per application returned, after deduplication within the run. Set maxResults to cap what a run can cost, and use opportunityTags to avoid paying for records you were only going to filter out afterwards.

Runs that return nothing cost nothing. Paid Apify plans get a lower rate per application.

🔌 Integrations

Send results straight to Google Sheets, Slack, Airtable, Zapier, Make or your own webhook using Apify integrations. You can also trigger a run whenever something happens in another tool, which is the usual way to drop new applications into a CRM as leads.

UK Planning Applications is also callable by AI agents through the Apify MCP server. An agent connected to the server can discover the Actor, read its input schema and call it as a tool under the identifier spookyweb/uk-planning-applications, then read the dataset back in the same session. That lets an assistant asked what is being built near an address answer from the live register rather than from memory. Setup is covered in the Apify MCP documentation.

🔗 Using UK Planning Applications with the Apify API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/spookyweb~uk-planning-applications/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"recentDays": 90, "postcode": "BS1 4DJ", "radiusKm": 10, "opportunityTags": ["solar"], "maxResults": 500}'

Or with the Apify client:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('spookyweb/uk-planning-applications').call({
  recentDays: 90,
  postcode: 'BS1 4DJ',
  radiusKm: 10,
  opportunityTags: ['solar'],
  maxResults: 500,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

Full detail is in the Apify API reference, and every run is also callable from the Python and JavaScript clients.

❓ FAQ

Which councils are covered?

Every UK council. The Actor reads PlanIt, which aggregates more than 300 local authority planning portals into one place. Leave areas blank to search the whole country, or pass a comma separated list of council names to restrict it.

What are opportunity tags?

A classification of the work being proposed, applied to each application from its description. The tags are solar, extension, loft-conversion, new-dwelling, change-of-use, demolition, roofing, windows-doors, driveway-landscaping, trees, signage, listed-building and commercial. Pass the ones you want in opportunityTags and everything else is filtered out before it reaches your dataset.

Why does a wide radius time out?

Because PlanIt's own data source gives up after 45 seconds, and a radius above roughly 10km crosses that line most of the time. Keep radiusKm at 10 or below and run several searches around different postcodes instead of one wide one. The radius section above has the measurements.

How current is it?

PlanIt collects from council portals continuously, so a run returns what has been published up to that point. There is a lag between a council receiving an application and putting it on its portal, and that varies by council. Set recentDays to 7 to catch the freshest window.

Can I monitor for new applications?

Yes. Set recentDays to 1 or 7, fix a postcode and radiusKm, choose your opportunityTags, then schedule the run daily with Apify's scheduler. Results are deduplicated within a run, so pair it with your own key on uid to spot genuinely new records across runs.

Can I search by applicant or agent?

Yes, developerText searches applicant and agent names and addresses, which is how you track a particular architect or developer across councils. Note that applicant and agent fields only appear where the council publishes them.

⚖️ Is it legal to scrape planning applications?

Planning applications are a statutory public register every council must publish so neighbours and the public can see and comment on what is proposed. This Actor reads the PlanIt aggregator, which collects those council registers, and it never logs in.

Applicant and agent details appear because the council published them as part of the planning process, so onward use is your responsibility under GDPR. Apify's ethical scraping guide covers the wider picture.

👍 Your feedback

Found a bug, or want a field that is not here yet? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab. Requests that make the data more useful get built, and problems get fixed quickly.

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