Fairfield City Council — Development Application Data
With 1,091 development applications lodged in the past year and a median assessment time of 95 days, Fairfield City Council processes one of the highest DA volumes in Sydney, though owners should plan for a three-month wait from lodgement to determination. The 3,329 applications on file since 2021 reflect diverse project types: 1,846 classified as Other, 598 dual occupancies, 296 alterations and additions, and 226 subdivisions. Cost distribution skews toward smaller works, with 1,457 DAs under $100,000, yet 326 fall in the $1 million to $5 million range and 124 exceed $5 million. Only 1.74% of applications invoke Clause 4.6 variations to vary development standards, suggesting most proposals conform to planning controls or developers choose compliant designs from the outset. Insufficient determination data prevents analysis of common refusal grounds at this stage. A Plan Advice AI assessment for your Fairfield City property runs in seconds and shows you exactly where your proposal sits against these benchmarks.
Determination outcomes
Real approval, refusal and withdrawal rates from finalised DAs in the Plan Advice enriched corpus.
Based on the 100% of DAs in our Fairfield City Council corpus with a confirmed determination. Applications still under assessment, and any whose outcome the council has not published, are excluded rather than estimated.
Development type mix
What people are building in Fairfield City Council. Ranked by DA volume.
Development cost distribution
Estimated development cost ranges reported on Fairfield City Council DAs.
Fairfield City Council DAs — common questions
Answered from this council's own determinations. Where a council has not published a figure, the question is left out rather than guessed.
How many development applications does Fairfield City Council handle?
Plan Advice holds 3,427 development applications for Fairfield City Council, 1,149 of them lodged in the last 12 months. The figures on this page are counted from that register, not estimated.
How long does a DA take in Fairfield City Council?
The median assessment time is 95 days for FY25-26, after a median 9 days to get the application accepted for lodgement. That is the council's own reported figure from the NSW Planning Portal league tables, so it covers every DA they determined — not a sample.
What share of DAs does Fairfield City Council approve?
86.9% of the 1,962 determined applications we hold were approved and 13.1% were refused. We can read a determination for 100% of this council's DAs; the rest are counted as unknown rather than assumed approved.
What kinds of development are most common in Fairfield City Council?
The most frequent application types are dual occupancy (614), alterations & additions (304), subdivision (229).
How often is a clause 4.6 variation used in Fairfield City Council?
62 applications — 1.81% of the register — sought a clause 4.6 variation to a development standard.
Most recent development applications
Sampled from the NSW Planning Portal open-data feed.
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