Planning Permission Timeline in Ireland: 31 Councils Ranked (2025)

Ireland's local authorities issued 36,057 planning decisions in 2025. The national median time from application received to decision issued was 54 days, just inside the 56-day statutory clock that section 34 of the Planning Act nominally requires. Half of all decisions arrived within eight weeks. The other half did not.

The national median hides a 51-day gap between the fastest and slowest councils. Dublin City Council decides the typical application in 46 days. Roscommon County Council takes 97. If you are filing a planning application in Ireland, which desk it lands on matters more than anything else about the scheme itself.

What the leaderboard is measuring

The number next to each council is the median: the middle case. Half of decisions come in faster, half slower. We chose the median because averages get distorted by outliers. A single appeal that drags on for three years swings a council's mean dramatically without being typical of anything.

The statutory clock is 56 days from the date an application is validated. Under section 34, councils are required to issue a decision inside that window or request further information to pause it. In practice the clock is paused often. Every "Further Information" request a council issues stops the statutory clock and restarts it when the applicant responds. That is why a council can report most decisions within the statutory period while applicants experience timelines measured in months. The figures above do not adjust for FI pauses. They show the full elapsed time from received to decided.

The tail is where projects die

Expand any council in the leaderboard and you will see a second number: the 90th percentile. This is the "unlucky 10%" case, the slowest one-in-ten application in that council's 2025 caseload.

The p90 varies far more than the median. Wexford's p90 is 61 days. The distribution is tight, very few outliers. Louth's p90 is 244 days against a median of 52. That tells you two things. Louth handles the typical case inside the clock, but when it slips, it slips hard. One in ten Louth applicants waits eight months or longer.

For anyone scoping a development, the median is a planning assumption. The p90 is a risk assumption. Schemes with project finance, option periods, or grid-connect deadlines cannot afford to discover their application is in the 10% tail after six months of elapsed time. The viability ceiling kicks in long before the slowest council does.

The part councils don't publish

Six councils in Ireland report a category that the other 25 don't: "invalidated" and "withdrawn" applications. These are filings that never receive a formal decision. Either the council kicks them back as invalid before the clock starts, or the applicant withdraws before conclusion.

In Dublin City Council's 2025 caseload, 25.9% of processed filings fall into this bucket. More than a quarter of every planning application that enters the DCC register is never formally decided. In Fingal the figure is 14.3%. In Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown, 12.6%.

Among the rural councils, the published dropout rate is zero. That is not because their processes are cleaner. Their registers simply do not record this category in a machine-readable way. Applications that get withdrawn or ruled invalid disappear from the audit trail rather than being flagged with an outcome. Archa identifies these filings by their absence of a final decision after six months or more, but for comparability with public statistics we only count what the register labels.

The implication for anyone comparing councils: the councils that look "harsher" on their headline grant rate are often just the ones that publish the full funnel.

If you get appealed, add four months

An Bord Pleanala decided 2,801 cases in 2025 where the full timeline was recordable. The median time from lodgement to ABP decision was 123 days. The 90th percentile was 411 days. Over 13 months.

Combine council and ABP. The median council-level processing time for applications that were appealed was 62 days, versus 54 for non-appealed cases. Add 123 days of ABP and an appealed application takes roughly 185 days from the day it is filed to the day it is finally decided. That is six months. In the unlucky-10% tail, council plus ABP totals approach 700 days. Nearly two years.

Appeal rates in 2025 varied from 1.7% (Cork County) to 9.3% (Galway City). On average, about 5% of permissions are appealed. For a developer's financing memo, "5% appeal probability adding 180+ days" is a materially different risk than the per-council median suggests.

Application type barely matters

Retentions and change-of-use applications are often assumed to be faster than new builds because they look simpler on paper. They are not.

Inside 2025 decisions, the median for new-build applications was 55 days. Extensions: 53. Alterations: 53. Retentions: 54. Change of use: 55. Demolitions: 55. The medians cluster within a two-day band.

What varies is the tail. New-build p90 is 219 days. Extensions p90 is 153 days. Retentions p90 is 177. So while the typical extension is no faster than a new build, the worst-case extension is a month quicker. If your application hits a problem, its type matters a bit. If it doesn't, it doesn't.

The outlier is "other," which mostly covers section 5 declarations (is this exempted?) and pre-planning certificates. Those come back in 47 days at the median, 61 at the p90. If your question is really whether you need permission at all, there is a faster route than filing a full application.

Is it getting worse?

No. The national median has been 53-55 days every year from 2020 onwards. The 90th percentile has oscillated in a 174-208 day band. On this evidence, the system is neither accelerating nor degrading. It is running at a steady state.

That is itself a finding. Every housing and planning White Paper since 2020 has promised to speed up decisions. The Housing for All package announced fast-track pathways. Delivering Homes, Building Communities inherited most of them in late 2025. None of it has moved the median by a single day.

The volume has not fallen either. 36,057 decisions in 2025, compared with 34,523 in 2024 and 32,960 in 2023. Councils are handling more applications at the same pace. Staffing the registers appears to have kept up with demand, even as the complexity of individual files has grown.

What this means for your project

If you are filing in Ireland in 2026, the planning assumption from this data is 54 days from received to decided at the median, plus a validation lag of two to four weeks before the clock even starts. The realistic worst case sits at eight to twelve weeks depending on council. A third-party appeal adds 120 to 200 days on top, so pencil in six to nine months from filing to certainty if that happens.

Which desk it lands on matters more than anything about the scheme. The same application filed in Wexford and Carlow will come out 41 days apart at the median and 206 days apart at the p90.

None of this excuses the nine rule changes we catalogued in the Rules Have Changed piece. Those changes get applied mid-flight to applications already in the system. The timeline data is about the administrative clock. Rule-change risk sits on top.

Methodology

Population. All applications in the Archa planning register with a received_date and a decision_date where the decision fell between 1 January 2025 and 31 December 2025, inclusive. 36,057 records across 31 local authorities.

Timeline measure. Calendar days between received_date and decision_date. Does not account for Further Information pauses, which stop and restart the statutory clock.

Statutory clock. Section 34 of the Planning and Development Act 2000 specifies an 8-week (56-day) decision period for most applications. Extensions, strategic infrastructure, and certain plan-based consents have different periods.

Dropout category. Council registers vary in how they record invalidated and withdrawn applications. Six councils (Dublin City, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown, Fingal, South Dublin, Cork County, Wexford) consistently flag a machine-readable outcome category for these filings. The rest either do not record them in the register feed or fold them into "other." The dropout column in the leaderboard shows the published rate only.

Appeal matching. abp_case_linked is set when an ABP case reference has been cross-referenced to the council application. Matching uses the ABP case file's own council reference when present, plus spatial proximity within a 25m buffer for cases lacking a clean reference. Coverage is high but not exhaustive.

Trend data. National medians for 2020-2025 computed on the same base (applications decided within that calendar year, 0-2000 day elapsed time).

Sources