Northern Beaches Council — Development Application Data
With a median assessment time of 100 days, Northern Beaches Council sits well above the Sydney average, meaning your development application will likely face a longer wait than in neighbouring councils. Since 2021, council has processed 14,321 applications, with 4,681 lodged in the past year alone. The dominant category is classified as Other at 9,333 applications, followed by alterations and additions at 3,222 and dual occupancy at 735. Most projects fall into modest cost bands: 4,520 under $100,000 and 4,419 between $100,000 and $500,000. Only 5.8% of applicants have sought clause 4.6 variations to development standards. When refusals do occur, building height, scale, bulk or massing leads the grounds cited, alongside overshadowing concerns and privacy loss to neighbouring properties. A Plan Advice AI assessment for your Northern Beaches property runs in seconds and flags these common friction points before you invest in formal plans.
Determination outcomes
Real approval, refusal and withdrawal rates from finalised DAs in the Plan Advice enriched corpus.
Based on the 79.8% of DAs in our Northern Beaches Council corpus with a confirmed determination. Applications still under assessment, and any whose outcome the council has not published, are excluded rather than estimated.
Why DAs get refused in Northern Beaches Council
Grounds cited across 4 refused applications, read from the council's own notices of determination. Most recent determination indexed: October 2021. Most refusals cite several grounds at once, so these overlap.
Behind each ground above sits the verbatim paragraph the assessing officer wrote, the LEP and DCP clauses it was tested against, and the address and DA number so you can pull the notice yourself. 28 grounds across Northern Beaches Council are indexed this way.
See the grounds in fullConditions you should expect
Approval is not the finish line — every consent arrives with conditions. This is what Northern Beaches Council actually imposes, measured from the consent notices it has published.
Conditions marked costs money are the ones to budget for — contributions, bonds, specialist reports and public-domain works.
| 100% | Appoint a principal certifier | |
| 100% | Construction certificate before works start | |
| 99% | Sydney Water approval (Section 73)COSTS MONEY | |
| 98% | Asbestos / hazardous materials handling | |
| 98% | Long service levyCOSTS MONEY | |
| 97% | Security bond or damage depositCOSTS MONEY | |
| 96% | BASIX commitments | |
| 90% | Waste management plan | |
| 74% | Erosion and sediment control | |
| 64% | Stormwater / on-site detentionCOSTS MONEY | |
| 60% | Survey certificate at set-outCOSTS MONEY | |
| 59% | Section 7.11 developer contributionsCOSTS MONEY |
Based on 138 approvals with a published notice of determination · 6 of the conditions above carry a cost. A condition on most approvals is effectively standard; it is not a guarantee of what any individual consent will say.
Development type mix
What people are building in Northern Beaches Council. Ranked by DA volume.
Development cost distribution
Estimated development cost ranges reported on Northern Beaches Council DAs.
Northern Beaches 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 Northern Beaches Council handle?
Plan Advice holds 14,549 development applications for Northern Beaches Council, 4,819 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 Northern Beaches Council?
The median assessment time is 100 days for FY25-26, after a median 5 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 Northern Beaches Council approve?
96.1% of the 2,838 determined applications we hold were approved and 3.2% were refused. We can read a determination for 79.8% of this council's DAs; the rest are counted as unknown rather than assumed approved.
Why are DAs refused in Northern Beaches Council?
Across 4 refused applications, the grounds cited most often are other ground not covered above (2 refusals), building height, scale, bulk or massing (3 refusals), parking shortfall, traffic or vehicular access (2 refusals). These are read from the council's own notices of determination, and most refusals cite several grounds at once.
What kinds of development are most common in Northern Beaches Council?
The most frequent application types are alterations & additions (3,245), dual occupancy (744), subdivision (324).
How often is a clause 4.6 variation used in Northern Beaches Council?
858 applications — 5.9% 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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