Every week, homeowners, developers, and commercial landlords submit thousands of planning applications to local councils across England, Scotland, and Wales. For architects, builders, loft and extension specialists, solar and heat pump installers, surveyors, planning consultants, and property developers, those applications are one of the highest-intent sources of local work available.
The difficulty is fragmentation: over 400 UK local planning authorities publish applications across incompatible portal software (such as Idox Public Access, Northgate, Agile, and custom council registers). Checking ten neighbouring council websites manually every morning and copying addresses into a spreadsheet is slow and error-prone.
This guide explains how UK planning data is published, which filters produce actionable leads, and how to set up automated daily alerts using our UK Planning Applications Scraper on Apify.
Under UK town and country planning legislation, every local planning authority maintains a public register of planning applications. While individual councils host their own web portals, the open civic data service PlanIt aggregates and standardises planning applications from local authority portals across England, Scotland, and Wales.
Our UK Planning Applications Scraper connects to PlanIt and UK local council planning sources, applies your geographic, keyword, and status filters, deduplicates applications across runs, and exports clean rows ready for spreadsheets, email digests, or direct mail and CRM workflows.
You can combine any of the following filters in a single search:
RG14 1AA) and a search radius in kilometres to capture applications across council boundaries within your travel area.loft conversion, dormer, rear extension, two storey extension, garage conversion, outbuilding.solar, photovoltaic, air source heat pump, ASHP, EV charger, battery storage.change of use, Class MA, prior approval, HMO, new dwelling, demolition.daysBack): Specify how many days back to search (for example, daysBack: 7 for a weekly digest or daysBack: 2 for daily alerts).Every planning application returned by the scraper is normalised into the following fields:
uid – Unique application reference identifier across council and PlanIt records.authority – Name of the UK local planning authority or council.address – Site address of the proposed development.postcode – UK postcode extracted from the site address.description – Full proposal description submitted to the council.status – Normalised application state (such as undecided, permitted, refused, or withdrawn).application_type – Category of application (for example Full, Householder, Outline, Listed Building Consent, Prior Approval, or Tree Works).start_date – Date the application was validated or received by the council.decided_date – Decision date (when decided).lat and lng – WGS84 latitude and longitude coordinates for mapping.url – Direct link to the official application page on the local council's planning portal for drawings, documents, and officer reports.["extension", "loft conversion"]), and set daysBack: 7.onlyNew) so previously seen applications are skipped. Save your configuration as a reusable Task and attach a daily or weekly Schedule (for example 06:30 every morning).The UK Planning Applications Scraper uses transparent pay-per-result pricing at $0.008 per planning application ($8.00 per 1,000 results). There is no fixed monthly subscription fee, and Apify includes a free monthly usage credit on every account, which comfortably covers typical daily monitoring for local builders, architects, and consultants.
When tracking commercial planning applications (such as office fit-outs, warehouse extensions, or retail change-of-use applications), you can pass applicant or agent company names into our UK Company Website Enricher to automatically locate their official corporate websites, contact pages, email addresses, and LinkedIn profiles.
The scraper queries PlanIt and local council planning portals across England, Scotland, and Wales, covering over 400 local planning authorities and normalising different council portal systems into a single schema.
Each record includes uid, authority, address, postcode, description, status, application_type, start_date, decided_date, lat, lng, and url (the direct link to the application on the local council planning portal).
Pricing is pay-per-result at $0.008 per planning application ($8.00 per 1,000 applications). There is no monthly subscription fee, and Apify's free monthly usage credit covers typical daily monitoring schedules for local trades, architects, and consultants.
If you would like help configuring multi-council planning feeds or integrating daily alerts into your CRM, email hello@komossolutions.com or visit our Contact page.