Australia has no national register of development applications. Every DA is lodged with one of 500+ local councils, each running its own portal, its own reference format, and its own idea of what "public information" looks like. If you need DA data at any scale, whether for a report, a research project, or a product, you end up navigating that fragmentation yourself.
This guide covers every practical way to get DA data in Australia, from free council trackers to commercial APIs, with honest trade-offs for each. We build and sell one of these options, but the free routes are genuinely good for many use cases, so we cover them properly.
The short version
| Council trackers | State portals | PlanningAlerts | Commercial API | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Free | Free for personal use | From $199/mo |
| Coverage | One council at a time | NSW and SA only | Many councils | 365 councils, 8 states |
| Format | Web search UI | Web UI, some open data | Email alerts + API | REST API, JSON |
| History | Varies by council | Varies | Recent applications | Years, accumulating |
| Best for | One property or street | Single-state work | Watching a location | Products, reports, analysis |
The rest of this guide walks through each option in detail.
Option 1: Individual council DA trackers (free)
Almost every council publishes lodged and determined applications through an online tracker. These run on a handful of software platforms you will see again and again: ePathway, Development.i, MasterView, PD Online, Atlas/T1, and various custom builds.
Good for: checking a specific property or street, following a single application, small research tasks in one council area.
The catch: one council at a time. Search interfaces vary wildly, some require exact reference numbers, some hide historical records, and export is rarely supported. Councils also rebuild these portals regularly. In a single recent week we had to re-engineer our integrations for Gold Coast (migrated platforms entirely), Cardinia and Mornington Peninsula (added bot challenges), and Glenorchy (rebuilt their site). If you script against a council portal directly, plan for it to break.
A middle ground: we publish free DA tracker pages for every council we cover, with the same interface for all 365 of them, category breakdowns, and recent applications. No account needed. There is also a national map view if you think in areas rather than council names.
Option 2: State planning portals (free, partial)
Some states centralise DA information:
- NSW: the ePlanning Portal aggregates DAs lodged through the Planning Portal across most NSW councils. The deepest state-level source in the country.
- SA: PlanSA centralises development applications statewide under the state's planning system.
- QLD, VIC, WA, TAS: no genuine statewide DA portal. Data lives with individual councils, with varying quality. Victoria publishes aggregate permit statistics but not a live application feed.
Good for: NSW and SA work, where the state systems are genuinely useful.
The catch: coverage stops at the state border, fields and formats differ between states, and bulk access is not the design goal.
Option 3: PlanningAlerts (free alerts)
PlanningAlerts, run by the OpenAustralia Foundation, is a long-running open-source project that scrapes council DAs and emails you when something is lodged near an address you watch. It is a genuinely good public service, and if all you need is "tell me when something happens near this location", it is the simplest answer available.
Good for: neighbours, residents, and anyone watching a handful of locations.
The catch: it is built around email alerts for locations, not around bulk data, filtering by category, or integration into your own product. Commercial API use is a separate arrangement with the foundation.
Option 4: Commercial DA data APIs
When you need many councils, structured fields, history, and a feed that keeps working when council portals change, you are in commercial territory. This is what we build at DA Leads, so numbers below are ours, current as of July 2026 and queryable live through the API:
- 842,000+ development applications across 365 councils in all 8 states and territories
- Refreshed daily, with AI classification into 27 trade categories and geocoding on every record
- Honest coverage by state: NSW is deepest (129 councils, 519k records), SA (78 councils, 196k), QLD (30 councils, 73k), VIC (88 councils, 39k), WA is metro-focused (18 councils), TAS/ACT/NT are thinner
- REST API with an interactive playground, SQL endpoint for analysts, and MCP support so AI assistants like Claude can query it directly
Plans start at $199/month, with a free tier to evaluate. Other commercial options exist at enterprise price points, notably Cordell and BCI Central, which are construction-lead products with human-curated project data rather than raw DA feeds.
Good for: proptech products, research teams producing reports, anyone embedding DA data into their own tooling.
The catch: it costs money. If you only care about one council or one address, use the free routes above.
How to choose
Ask three questions:
- How many councils? One: use the council tracker. One state (NSW/SA): the state portal may be enough. Many, or cross-state: you need an aggregator.
- Alerts or data? "Tell me when" is PlanningAlerts' home ground. "Give me the records so I can compute on them" needs an API or export.
- Does it need to keep working? Scripts against council portals break every time a council rebuilds its site, which is constantly. Part of what you pay an aggregator for is that the breakage becomes their problem instead of yours.
FAQ
Is there a single national database of development applications in Australia? No. DAs are lodged with local councils under state planning systems. NSW and SA centralise much of it at state level; everywhere else the data lives council by council. Aggregated national coverage only exists through third parties that collect it.
Is DA data free? Individual lookups are free on council trackers, state portals, and our own council tracker pages. PlanningAlerts offers free email alerts. Bulk, structured, multi-council data is generally commercial.
How current is DA data? Council portals show applications shortly after lodgement. Our own dataset refreshes once a day overnight, and most aggregators work on a similar daily cycle.
Can I get historical DA data? It varies by council. Some trackers expose years of history, some only recent applications. Aggregators accumulate history as they run; our records go back several years for most covered councils, deepest in NSW and SA.
What fields does DA data normally include? A council reference, address, description of works, lodgement date, and status are near-universal. Cost of development, applicant details, and determination outcomes vary by council and state. Structured category and geocoding are typically added by aggregators rather than published by councils.
