NSW Council DA Approval Times, Ranked: From 7 Days to 54 (2025 Data)

Ask ten people how long a development application takes and you will get ten guesses, all of them anxious. The number is not actually a mystery. It is sitting in the public DA records, one lodgement date and one decision date at a time. We pulled 110,667 of them.

This is the council-by-council view of how long a NSW development application takes to decide, measured as the days between lodgement and determination. Every figure below comes from our database snapshot on 15 July 2026, covering NSW applications lodged from 1 January 2025 that have since been decided.

The one number most people get wrong

Across all 110,667 decided NSW applications, the median decision time is 20 days. The average is 36. Those two numbers are not a rounding difference, and the gap is the whole point: a handful of applications that drag on for many months pull the average up, while most applications land much closer to the median. When someone quotes you an average DA time, they are quoting the number that the slowest 10% inflate. The typical application, the one in the middle, is decided in about three weeks.

But that statewide median hides an enormous spread once you look at individual councils. In the busiest 72 councils, each with at least 300 decided applications, the median decision time ranges from 7 days to 54 days. That is close to an eightfold difference depending on which side of a council boundary your site sits.

Here is that spread across the whole state. Each council is shaded by its typical decision time, green for the fast ones and red for the slow. Click any council to see its exact numbers.

The fast green core sits over Sydney and the Hunter, where high-volume councils have systematised their assessment. The reds are scattered along the coast and the ranges, where environmental overlays and heritage controls slow things down. Grey councils fell below our 300-application threshold for a stable ranking.

Before you read this as a scoreboard

Three honest caveats before the tables, because this data can be misread.

• NSW only. Other states record decision dates far too sparsely for a fair ranking. We are not going to rank a council on ten data points, so this piece stays inside NSW where the record is dense.
• This is council processing time, not your total timeline. We measure lodgement to decision. It says nothing about the weeks or months of pre-lodgement work, RFIs, and consultant reports that happen before the clock in this data starts.
• The fastest councils include fast-track and administrative decisions. A 7-day median does not mean every merit assessment clears in a week. Some of those quick determinations are modifications, minor works, or applications that were straightforward on arrival. Read the fast end as "this council does not sit on simple applications," not "complex projects fly through."

The fastest councils

The most counterintuitive result is at the very top. The Council of the City of Sydney, with 4,527 decided applications, the largest workload of any council on the list, also posts the fastest median at 7 days. Right behind it, Blacktown (4,349 applications) and Liverpool (3,310) both turn most applications around in one to two weeks. Volume is clearly not what slows a council down. These are high-throughput planning departments that have systematised the routine work.

Notice the 90th percentile column though. City of Sydney's median is 7 days, but its 90th percentile is 71. That is the honest texture of a fast council: it clears the simple majority almost immediately, then a long tail of genuinely complex applications still takes months. A fast median is a promise about your straightforward application, not your hardest one.

The slowest councils

The slow end tells a cleaner story than the fast end. It splits into two groups. The first is affluent, heritage-heavy metro councils: Woollahra (48), Mosman (49), Inner West (37), Waverley and Northern Beaches (both 32). These are areas where conservation areas, view-sharing disputes, and character controls turn even a modest alteration into a contested assessment. The second group is environmentally sensitive regional and coastal councils: Byron (41), Tweed (46), Blue Mountains (43), Yass Valley (54). Bushfire, flood, biodiversity, and scenic-protection overlays stack extra referral steps onto every application.

The pattern is worth saying plainly: slowness tracks complexity, not workload. The councils that make you wait are not the overwhelmed ones. They are the ones where the planning terrain itself is difficult, whether that is heritage in the eastern suburbs or environmental overlays on the coast.

Even inside Sydney, it is a lottery

You do not need to compare a fast regional council with a slow coastal one to see the gap. It exists across the road within Greater Sydney, under the same state planning law.

A development application in the City of Sydney is typically decided in a week. The same application in Mosman or Woollahra, a short drive east, sits for seven weeks. That is a sevenfold difference between two councils in the same metropolitan market. If you work across Sydney LGAs and treat "the council will take about a month" as a flat assumption, you are mispricing half your pipeline.

Approval is rarely the question. Time is.

Here is the number that reframes the whole exercise. Across the 72 ranked councils, explicit refusals number in the dozens, against tens of thousands of approvals. In the busiest council on the list, City of Sydney, just 4 of 4,527 decided applications were recorded as refused. In most councils the refused count is zero, one, or two.

A caveat, because we would rather undersell this than fake precision: a large share of decided applications are logged with a generic determined status that does not split into approve versus refuse, so we will not quote you a single headline approval rate. But the direction is unambiguous. Outright refusal is a rare event. If your application is sound, the binary outcome is close to a foregone conclusion.

Which means the variable that actually costs you money is not whether you get approved. It is how long your capital sits idle waiting for a stamp. On a project where holding costs, bridging finance, or a settlement deadline are in play, the difference between a 7-day council and a 54-day council is not a statistic. It is the interest bill.

Most councils land between 11 and 30 days

Zooming out from the extremes, the bulk of NSW councils cluster in a reasonable band. Of the 72 councils, 51 have a median decision time of 30 days or less. Only 9 sit above 40 days. So the typical NSW council is not the horror story, and it is not the 7-day flyer either. It is a three-to-four-week turnaround on a routine application, with a long tail reserved for the genuinely hard cases.

The reason this distribution matters is that it sets expectations honestly. If a consultant or council officer tells you your straightforward DA will take four months, this data gives you the standing to ask why, because four months is the exception in NSW, not the norm.

What this actually changes if you lodge in NSW

If you develop, design, or advise on sites across multiple LGAs, this ranking is a planning input, not just trivia. A site on the fast side of a boundary carries a materially different holding-cost profile than an identical site two streets over in a slow council. When you are comparing feasibility on two potential acquisitions, decision speed belongs in the model alongside land price and yield.

It also tells you where to spend your pre-lodgement effort. In a fast council, a clean, complete application is rewarded almost immediately, so front-loading the work pays off directly. In a slow, overlay-heavy council, the timeline is dominated by referrals you cannot compress, so the smarter move is to identify those triggers early and design around them rather than assume you can hurry the assessment later.

How we measured this

The dataset is every NSW development application in our database that was lodged on or after 1 January 2025 and has since received a decision, where both the lodgement date and the decision date are recorded and the decision falls between 0 and 730 days after lodgement (to exclude data-entry errors and reopened matters). That is 110,667 applications statewide. We then kept the 72 councils with at least 300 such applications, so that no council is ranked on a thin sample.

Decision time is lodgement date to decision date in calendar days. We report the median rather than the mean because the mean is distorted by a small number of very long assessments. The 90th percentile column shows where the slow tail sits for each council. We did not model application type, so a council's median reflects its real mix of simple and complex work, which is exactly what you experience as an applicant.

For the related NSW picture on which approval pathway to use in the first place, see our breakdown of CDC versus DA in NSW, and for where the volume is going, 8,092 granny flat DAs in 12 months.

FAQ

Which NSW council approves development applications the fastest? On 2025 data, the Council of the City of Sydney and Tamworth Regional Council share the fastest median decision time at 7 days, followed by Liverpool, Ryde, and Burwood at 8 days. These medians cover the typical application; genuinely complex proposals in the same councils still take considerably longer.

Which NSW council is the slowest for DAs? Yass Valley Council has the slowest median at 54 days, followed by Mosman (49), Woollahra (48), Wentworth (46), and Tweed Shire (46). The slow end is dominated by heritage-heavy metro councils and environmentally sensitive coastal and regional councils, where overlays and referrals add steps to every assessment.

Is a slow council more likely to refuse my application? No. Slow decision times reflect assessment complexity, not a higher refusal rate. Across all 72 councils, outright refusals number in the dozens against tens of thousands of approvals. Time, not approval, is the real variable.

Why is the median so different from the average DA time I usually see quoted? Because a small number of very long assessments pull the average up. The statewide median is 20 days but the mean is 36. The median describes the typical application; the average describes a distribution skewed by its slowest cases. For planning your own timeline, the median is the more honest number.

Does this include the time before I lodge? No. This measures council processing time only, from the day an application is lodged to the day it is decided. Your pre-lodgement preparation, consultant reports, and any pause for requested information sit outside this figure.

If you want to see decision times, approval mix, and application volume for a specific council or site rather than a state ranking, that is exactly what DA Leads tracks across more than 365 councils. The council speed you lodge into is one of the cheapest things to check before you commit capital, and one of the most expensive to get wrong.