The state will pay for half its council assessment officers to sit a half day course on the new planning rules. The program targets what planners ask for, not how many of them there are.
Every builder who has lodged a development application in New South Wales knows the feeling of being asked for something that has no bearing on whether the job gets approved.
An extra shadow diagram. A report on a matter the zoning already settled. A request for information that adds six weeks to the clock and changes nothing about the decision at the end of it.
On 23 September the NSW Government announced it will initially pay for 950 council development assessment officers to be trained, with places offered to all 128 councils in the state. The course was built by the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure with the Planning Institute of Australia. It is called the NSW Planning Practice Program and it runs for half a day.
That is the whole intervention. Half a day, roughly half the officers who handle DAs, no new legislation.
It is worth understanding what it is trying to change, because it is not the same kind of reform as the ones that came before it.
The earlier reforms changed the rules. This one goes at how the rules get applied.
Since 2023 NSW has run a long pipeline of planning changes. The Transport Oriented Development program, the Pattern Book, the Low and Mid Rise Housing policy, the Housing Delivery Authority, the Development Coordination Authority, and the 2025 overhaul of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 through the Environmental Planning and Assessment Amendment (Planning System Reforms) Act 2025.
Every one of those changed what the system permits, or who gets to decide it.
The Planning Practice Program goes at something else. According to the Department, the training is aimed at shifting assessment officers toward examining the matters that are most relevant and proportionate to the application in front of them, and at helping councils build that thinking into their assessment processes and team practices.
Translated into something a builder recognises, that is the request for information. The habit of asking is the thing being targeted.
Proportionate assessment
Proportionality was added to the objects of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 in 2025, alongside housing delivery and climate resilience, by the amending Act commonly called the Planning System Reforms Act. It means the depth of assessment, and the material an applicant is asked to supply, should match the scale and the risk of what is actually proposed. A second storey addition and a 40 lot subdivision are not meant to attract the same scrutiny.
Councils are now measured against 90 days, down from 105
The training lands in the middle of a tighter performance regime. The Statement of Expectations Order 2026 took effect on 1 July 2026 and reset the determination targets councils are held to.
Councils are expected to determine DAs within an average of 90 days of lodgement this financial year, 80 days from 1 July 2027, and 65 days from 1 July 2028. Where a council beat those numbers in the previous financial year, it is held to its own average instead.
Those are gross days. The count runs lodgement to determination, weekends and public holidays included, with no allowance for time a council spends waiting on an applicant. The Department measures end to end because that is the timeframe the industry actually experiences.
Which is why a request for information is expensive. It does not stop the clock for the council, and it does nothing at all for the builder’s holding costs.
The state average already sits inside the target, so the pressure has moved to the tail
Departmental figures show average assessment timeframes across NSW fell from 115 days to 84 days as at 31 May 2026, an improvement of 31 days since the council league table was introduced on 1 July 2024.
So the statewide average now sits six days under the number councils are measured against. The headline problem has largely been solved. What is left is the spread between councils.
The underperformance criteria moved to match. Under the 2026 Order the Department focuses support on councils taking 90 days or more to determine applications, where the threshold was 105 days the year before. Councils where 60 per cent or less of applications meet the expected timeframe are also captured, as are councils carrying a housing target or projected demand above 500 dwellings.
That is a considerably wider net than the previous version. A council averaging 95 days was comfortably outside the criteria last financial year. This year it is inside them.
The headline problem has largely been solved. What is left is the spread between councils.
A half day course does not fill a vacancy
Here is the part the announcement does not reach.
The Local Government Skills Audit published in June 2026 by the Australian Local Government Association and Public Skills Australia surveyed 69 NSW councils. Of the 67 that answered on occupational shortages, 44.8 per cent named urban and town planners, level with building surveyors and behind only engineers on 56.7 per cent. Looking forward, 53.7 per cent expect planners to remain hard to fill.
Seventy per cent of the responding NSW councils reported being understaffed. Among those that gave vacancy numbers, the average vacancy rate was 7.4 per cent. Shortages are sharpest in rural and remote councils, where location, housing scarcity and private sector competition compound.
Training an officer who is already carrying a heavy case load makes that officer better at triage. It does not give the council another set of hands, and it does not shorten a recruitment cycle that the same report found runs to three months at most councils and beyond six months at around nine per cent of them.
Capability and capacity are different constraints. This program addresses the first one.
Newcastle’s model is the part that moves throughput
The release positions the training alongside the Accelerated Development Assessment Program, which is the statewide rollout of a system City of Newcastle built for itself in 2022.
Newcastle’s Accelerated Development Application pathway screens low risk, decision ready applications through an eligibility checker before lodgement, then runs them on a separate track. The council reports more than 1,300 applications processed through it, a 52 per cent reduction in undetermined DAs, and determination typically within 10 days for eligible applications, stretching to 25 days where public notification or a referral to Ausgrid is required.
The NSW Government awarded City of Newcastle $2 million to build the framework for extending that model to other councils, after an earlier grant funded implementations at Muswellbrook and Upper Hunter.
The distinction between the two initiatives is worth holding onto. The accelerated pathway changes the route an application travels down. The training changes the judgement applied inside whichever route it takes. Newcastle happens to run both, which is part of why it keeps appearing at the top of the league table.
What actually changes for a DA lodged this financial year
Nothing in this program alters a statutory timeframe. The 40 day deemed refusal period is untouched. Complying development still runs on its own fast track, 20 days in the standard case. No applicant gains a new right and no council gains a new power.
Two things are observably different. Councils are being measured against a tighter number with a wider underperformance net beneath it, and a portion of the officers assessing applications this year will have sat through a session telling them to stop asking for material that does not bear on the decision.
How much of that reaches a particular counter depends on things the announcement does not specify. Which councils take up their places. Whether 950 officers is enough to shift a team’s culture or merely to inform a few people in it. Whether the reform principles get written into assessment procedures, as the Department intends, or stay in the notes of whoever attended.
The Government describes the 950 places as covering up to half the state’s council planners. It is worth reading that precisely. It is 950 development assessment officers, not 950 planners across every function, and the councils that need the help most are the ones least able to release staff for half a day.
The council league table is public and updated monthly. For a builder weighing where a project sits and what the approval timeline realistically looks like, the council’s own trend line on that table remains a better guide than any announcement about it.
THE GOOD BUILDER TAKE
The state has spent three years changing the planning rules and has just noticed that the people applying them were never trained in the new thinking. That is a fair fix and the proportionality focus is the right target, because the request for information is where most DA time quietly disappears. Just keep it in proportion. Half a day of training does not recruit the planner a council cannot find, and councils themselves name planners as one of their three hardest roles to fill. Watch your council’s league table trend, not the media release.
Frequently asked questions
It is a half day training course for council development assessment officers, developed by the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure with the Planning Institute of Australia. It covers how to apply recent NSW planning reforms consistently, with a focus on assessing matters that are relevant and proportionate to the application. The NSW Government announced on 23 September 2026 that it will initially pay for 950 places, offered to all 128 councils. The release describes that as covering up to half the state’s council planners.
Under the Statement of Expectations Order 2026, which took effect on 1 July 2026, councils are expected to determine development applications within an average of 90 days of lodgement for the current financial year. That tightens to 80 days from 1 July 2027 and 65 days from 1 July 2028. Councils that performed better than the target in the previous financial year are held to their own average. The statewide average was 84 days as at 31 May 2026.
Not directly. The program does not change any statutory timeframe. The 40 day deemed refusal period and the complying development pathway are unchanged. The intended effect is indirect, through assessment officers requesting less material that does not bear on the decision and councils building proportionality into their assessment processes.
The Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure publishes a council league table tracking lodgement and determination performance for every NSW council, using data from the NSW Planning Portal. Performance is captured on the sixth business day of each month. From the August 2026 data release the methodology counts deferred commencement consents as determined applications, applied to both current and previously reported data.
It is the statewide rollout of a system developed by City of Newcastle in 2022, which screens low risk, decision ready applications through an eligibility checker and assesses them on a separate track. Newcastle reports eligible applications are typically determined within 10 days. The NSW Government awarded City of Newcastle $2 million to build the framework for extending the model to other councils.
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Last updated 24 September 2026. Council determination averages and league table positions are updated monthly by the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure.
General information only. This article does not constitute planning, legal or financial advice. Builders, developers and applicants should seek professional advice specific to their projects and circumstances.
Author: TGB Editorial
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