South Australia did something in March 2021 that no other state has done: it threw out every council development plan and replaced them with one statewide rulebook, the Planning and Design Code, with one ePlanning portal in front of it. Every application since then has been sorted into an assessment lane: Accepted development at the light end, Deemed-to-Satisfy for proposals that tick the Code's quantitative boxes, and Performance Assessed for everything needing judgement.
Which lane a project lands in decides how much assessment stands between lodgement and consent. But because pathway data sat unclassified in most datasets, nobody could say how the lanes actually split in practice. We went back to the PlanSA register and resolved the assessment pathway for every application in our database. Here is what 167,118 applications since the Code went fully live say.
All figures computed from the DA Leads national application database, snapshot 13 July 2026, pathway data resolved from the PlanSA register. Applications lodged 2021 to 11 July 2026 on the three assessment lanes; land divisions counted separately and excluded here, as are the roughly 5% of records the register no longer returns a pathway for.
The split: three in ten take a codified lane
Across the Code era, the lanes divide like this: Performance Assessed 70.1%, Accepted 17.5%, Deemed-to-Satisfy 12.5%. Three in ten SA applications travel a codified lane where the assessment is a rules check rather than a merit judgement.
The share has been remarkably stable, with a mild drift downward:
* 2026 covers January to 11 July.
That stability is itself the story, because it is the opposite of what is happening in NSW. There, the fast track's share of new applications has climbed every single year, from 25.5% in 2021 to 45.3% in 2026, as policy keeps widening what qualifies. SA opened the Code at around a third and has hovered just under it since; Deemed-to-Satisfy lodgements have actually thinned from 3,956 in 2021 to 2,664 in 2025 while Accepted holds steady around 5,000 a year. Same idea, two very different trajectories. We unpacked the NSW side in CDC vs DA in NSW: what 518,000 applications say.
The council league table: 52% to 12%
Among the 30 SA councils with at least 1,500 assessed applications, the codified-lane share spans a factor of four and a half:
The extremes, with the volumes behind them:
| # | Council | Codified share | Accepted + DtS | All assessed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Playford | 52.0% | 6,127 | 11,792 |
| 2 | Adelaide Plains | 39.1% | 883 | 2,258 |
| 3 | Onkaparinga | 37.9% | 5,365 | 14,168 |
| 4 | Victor Harbor | 37.5% | 930 | 2,478 |
| 5 | Light Regional | 37.0% | 945 | 2,551 |
| 6 | Marion | 36.4% | 2,465 | 6,781 |
| … | ||||
| 26 | Norwood Payneham & St Peters | 21.1% | 783 | 3,716 |
| 27 | Holdfast Bay | 20.0% | 672 | 3,368 |
| 28 | Prospect | 19.3% | 347 | 1,799 |
| 29 | Mid Murray | 17.7% | 407 | 2,294 |
| 30 | Unley | 11.6% | 418 | 3,613 |
If you read our NSW council league table, this pattern will look familiar, because it is the same one wearing different zone names. Playford, at the top with more than half its applications codified, is Adelaide's northern growth corridor: Angle Vale is the single busiest codified-lane suburb in the state (1,086 applications), with Munno Para, Davoren Park and the master-planned Riverlea Park close behind. New estates produce exactly the regular, overlay-free lots the Code's quantitative standards were written for. Onkaparinga plays the same role in the south, and Mount Barker (805) does it in the hills.
At the bottom sits the eastern and inner-southern heritage ring: Unley at 11.6%, Prospect, Norwood Payneham & St Peters, Burnside, Mitcham. These are Adelaide's stone-villa and character-overlay suburbs, where Historic Area and Character Area overlays push proposals off the codified lanes and into Performance Assessment. Adelaide Hills (21.1%) adds the bushfire dimension: hazard overlays do to the Hills what heritage does to Unley.
What this is worth
If you are buying land to build on, the LGA prior matters twice in SA: once for the odds (a Playford lot is four times more likely to ride a codified lane than an Unley one) and once for the mechanism, because the overlays that force Performance Assessment are knowable in advance, per lot. Our free approval pathway check screens any Australian address; for SA it reads the zone and hazard layers and answers in the Code's own terms, Deemed-to-Satisfy versus Performance Assessed, honestly marked as indicative.
If you sell to the residential construction market, the lanes are timing signals. A codified-lane consent means the builder is mobilising now; a Performance Assessed application is visible earlier and longer. Both are in our leads feed, pathway-flagged, and on the map parcel by parcel.
One honest limitation: the PlanSA register does not expose decision dates on these records, so we cannot publish the SA equivalent of NSW's median 5-day CDC versus 57-day DA turnaround. When the data allows it, we will.
FAQ
What share of SA applications are Deemed-to-Satisfy? 12.5% of assessed applications since the Planning and Design Code went fully live in 2021, with another 17.5% Accepted and 70.1% Performance Assessed. Combined, three in ten SA applications travel a codified lane.
Which SA council has the most Deemed-to-Satisfy and Accepted development? Playford, at 52.0% of its 11,792 assessed applications since 2021, driven by the northern growth corridor around Angle Vale, Munno Para and Riverlea Park. Onkaparinga leads the south at 37.9%.
Why is Unley's codified share so low? Overlays. Unley's Historic Area and Character Area coverage routes most proposals into Performance Assessment regardless of size or budget, which is how a high-demand inner suburb ends up at 11.6%, the lowest of any large SA council.
Is SA's fast lane growing like NSW's CDC? No, and that is the interesting part. NSW's CDC share has climbed from 25.5% to 45.3% since 2021; SA's codified share opened around a third and has drifted mildly down to 27.1% in 2026. Deemed-to-Satisfy volumes have thinned year on year while Accepted holds steady.
Can I check which lane a specific SA lot would likely get? Indicatively, yes, free: the approval pathway check reads the zone and hazard layers at any address and answers in SA's own pathway terms. It is a desktop screen, not planning advice; the Code overlays on the certificate of title govern.
Where does this data come from? The DA Leads national application database, with assessment pathways resolved record by record from the PlanSA register (backfill completed 13 July 2026). Window: applications lodged 2021 to 11 July 2026 on the three assessment lanes; land divisions excluded; about 5% of records no longer resolvable in the register are excluded and disclosed.
