UK Development Land & Planning Pipeline Report
H2 2026
Published 28 August 2026 · Data cut-off 23 August 2026 (planning & sold-price) · Coverage snapshot 14 July 2026
Executive summary
Of the 438 UK towns in our planning-coverage register, 263 (60.0%) carried live, current planning-portal data as of our 14 July 2026 coverage snapshot — a separate, earlier check than the 23 August 2026 cut-off on the planning and sold-price figures below, so treat the coverage rate as a recent-but-not-identical vintage to the rest of this report. That coverage rate is the first number in this report because every figure that follows inherits it: this is a report on what we can see, not a claim to see the whole UK market.
Across the 348 towns with genuine (non-duplicated) Land Registry sold-price data, the median of town-level median prices is £281,750, against a mean year-on-year change of -0.8% — a broadly flat national picture rather than a strong directional move either way. New-build stock traded at a mean premium of 33.6% over existing stock across the same towns. 425,671 transactions were recorded across these towns in the trailing 12 months.
On the planning side, 235 local-authority planning datasets (deduplicated from 266 town-level files, where 31 were the same authority's figures attributed to more than one named town — see Section 2) show £25.3bn of combined estimated GDV in the current scrape window, split £601m already approved and £24.7bn still pending decision. That split matters: the pending figure is a forward-looking pipeline estimate from applicants' own planning submissions, not a confirmed delivery figure.
The mean approval rate across covered authorities is 18.6% — a figure that should be read alongside the scrape window itself (a rolling 3-month window per authority in most cases), which means a large share of applications inside any given snapshot are still awaiting decision rather than refused. A low approval-rate reading is far more often a "not yet decided" signal than a "being refused" one — Section 4 sets out how to tell the difference.
1. Coverage: what we can see
| Status | Towns |
|---|---|
| Live — current planning data | 263 |
| Enabled, no data returned | 7 |
| Disabled | 52 |
| Unmapped to a portal | 83 |
| Out of scope | 33 |
83 towns are unmapped rather than confirmed absent from a portal — a genuinely different status to "disabled," and the group most likely to move into "live" coverage over time as the underlying scraper set expands. Anywhere not marked LIVE is excluded from the aggregates in this report; we do not interpolate or estimate for gaps.
2. A methodology note on the planning totals
Why the town count changed between the raw files and the totals
Some single-tier local authorities have no town-level split in the source planning data, so the same authority-wide figures appear once per named town inside that authority. We deduplicate on (local authority, figures) before summing, which is why 31 of the raw planning files are excluded from the totals below — without that step the pending-GDV figure would overstate the true pipeline by counting several authorities' numbers two or three times over.
Sold-price data carries an equivalent, separately-flagged issue: some neighbourhoods have no HM Land Registry district-level split of their own, so a whole district's transaction data is attributed to them as a fallback. Those entries are excluded from the sold-price aggregates in Section 3, not summed alongside genuine neighbourhood-level data.
3. Sold-price picture
348 towns carry genuine (non-fallback) sold-price data. The £281,750 figure is a median of town-level medians, not a transaction-weighted national median — a town with 20 transactions and a town with 2,000 each contribute one data point to it. It is a measure of where the typical town's price level sits, not a measure of the typical transaction's price.
Mean year-on-year change across towns is -0.8%, and mean new-build premium is 33.6% — both averaged across towns on an unweighted basis for the same reason.
4. Planning pipeline
2,087 units sit behind the approved-GDV figure; 86,986 behind the pending figure. The pending pipeline is roughly 42x the size of the approved pipeline by unit count across the covered authorities — read that as a snapshot of a scrape window with a heavy weighting toward recently-submitted applications, not as a claim that most schemes end up approved.
Mean approval rate across authorities with a computable figure is 18.6%. Most authorities' scrape windows run 3 months, so an application submitted late in the window is very unlikely to have reached a decision yet — a low approval rate here is dominated by "awaiting decision," not "refused." A true refusal rate would need a longer, decision-only window, which this snapshot does not provide.
Methodology and data provenance
- ·Sold-price source: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, aggregated to town level in the Construction Capital data lake. 348 towns with genuine (non-fallback) data included; 56 excluded as district-level fallbacks. Price Paid Data is itself subject to a registration lag of several weeks to months behind actual completion, and this report does not carry a separate extract date for it beyond the lake sync — treat the sold-price figures as recent, not as of a single confirmed day.
- ·Planning source: council planning-portal exports (Idox, Civica, FastWeb, AgileApplications and Arcus, depending on authority), aggregated in the Construction Capital data lake. Latest update in the underlying data: 23 August 2026.
- ·Coverage manifest generated 14 July 2026: 438 towns tracked, 263 live.
- ·All figures in this report are computed programmatically from the source files at build time (scripts/generate-reports.mjs) — none are manually entered.
Known limitations
- This report does not include a data completeness or coverage figure for the 175 towns not currently LIVE — treat every national aggregate as a floor, not a total.
- Pending GDV is applicant-submitted, not independently verified, and includes schemes that may later be refused, reduced in scale, or withdrawn.
- Median-of-medians pricing is not transaction-weighted — see Section 3.
- Approval rate is a snapshot-window figure dominated by undecided applications, not a true refusal rate — see Section 4.
- Mean approval rate is also an unweighted average across authorities — an authority with a handful of applications carries the same weight in the average as one with hundreds, so the headline rate is not a national volume-weighted figure.
- The coverage rate (Section 1) and the planning/sold-price figures (Sections 3-4) come from two different extraction runs, several weeks apart — see the two cut-off dates stated at the top of this report.
Questions on this report
Is the pending GDV figure a reliable forecast of what will actually get built?
No — it's the applicants' own submitted estimate at the point of application, before determination. Treat it as a measure of appetite and pipeline scale, not a delivery forecast.
Why isn't my town included?
Coverage is currently live for a majority but not all tracked towns — see Section 1. Get in touch if you need a specific location assessed directly.
This report is general market commentary compiled from HM Land Registry Price Paid Data and public planning-portal records, and is not property, investment or lending advice. Figures are as extracted on the stated dates; public registers and planning portals are subject to revision and backfill.