Permitted development rights are planning permission granted in advance by legislation. If your scheme fits one of the classes in the General Permitted Development Order you do not make a planning application at all — you apply for prior approval on a short list of named matters, and the council cannot refuse you on anything else.
That is the advantage, and it is real. This guide covers the rights worth knowing as a developer, what prior approval actually costs and takes, and the limits that turn a promising site into a dead one. Everything below is the position as at September 2026.
What permitted development rights actually give you
A full planning application is judged against the development plan as a whole. A prior approval application is judged against a closed list — transport, flooding, contamination, noise, natural light and a handful of others depending on the class. Policy objections that would sink a planning application are simply not matters the council gets to weigh.
Under Part 3 of the Order, if the council has not notified you of its decision within 56 days of receiving a valid application, you may proceed. That deemed consent is the reason permitted development is worth structuring a deal around.
The permitted development rights that matter to developers
- Class MA — Class E commercial to residential. No floorspace cap since 5 March 2024, but the building must have been in a qualifying commercial use for two continuous years before you apply. See our guide to Class MA.
- Class Q — agricultural buildings to dwellings. Up to 10 homes per agricultural unit, each no more than 150 sq m, 1,000 sq m across the lot. The Class Q eligibility checklist runs through the tests.
- Part 20, Classes A and AA–AD — new flats built above existing blocks of flats, shops, offices and houses. Height caps of 18 m or 30 m depending on the class. See airspace development under Part 20.
- Class ZA — demolish a vacant pre-1990 office, light industrial or purpose-built block of flats and rebuild as homes on the same footprint, up to 1,000 sq m and 18 m.
- Class G — Class E, betting office or pay day loan shop to a mixed use including up to two flats. The route to flats above a shop where the shop stays.
Prior approval is not a formality, and it is not free
These are the fees set by the Planning Portal schedule that took effect on 1 April 2026:
- Class MA — £260 for each dwellinghouse, with no cap;
- Class Q — £249, or £536 where the application includes building operations;
- Part 20 Classes A and AA–AD — £441 for each dwellinghouse below ten.
A ten-unit Class MA scheme is therefore £2,600 before a consultant has drawn anything. That is still a fraction of a full application, but price it.
Where developers get caught out
- Article 4 directions. A council can withdraw a permitted development right across a defined area. Class MA is the most heavily restricted, and the direction is often town-centre wide. Check before you offer — our guide to Article 4 directions explains how to read one.
- Article 2(3) land. Conservation areas, National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the Broads and World Heritage Sites. Class Q and every Part 20 class are excluded on it. Class MA is the exception: it works in a conservation area, with the ground-floor impact as a prior approval matter.
- Listed buildings and scheduled monuments. Excluded outright from Class Q, Class MA and Part 20 — and listed building consent is a separate regime that permitted development never touches.
- The 37 sq m floor. Since 6 April 2021, article 3(9A) of the Order refuses permission to any new dwelling under 37 sq m gross internal area, or one that fails the nationally described space standard. It applies to every class in Schedule 2. Small studios are not a permitted development play.
- You cannot stack rights. A building whose residential use was granted only by Class MA cannot then take additional storeys under Part 20. Class A also excludes buildings converted under Classes M, N, O, P, PA or Q.
How much permitted development actually delivers
Worth keeping in proportion. Of the 17,710 additional dwellings from change of use in England in 2024-25, 7,681 came through permitted development: 5,154 office to residential, 1,048 Class E to residential and 462 agricultural to residential. Class Q is a small, specialised market. That is exactly why a sourcer who understands it competes with fewer people.
How to check permitted development potential on a site
Two questions decide it: what use class is the building in now, and has the right been withdrawn here? BOOM!’s Use Class layer, built on Ordnance Survey’s Land Use dataset, answers the first. The Article 4 Direction layer answers the second, and the conservation area and listed building layers cover the designations that rule most classes out.
All of them sit in SiteSeeker as raw layers you can read, and as sourcing constraints you can apply — so you can filter a search down to sites where the right still exists rather than checking them one at a time. Searching planning applications for prior approval decisions in the same area tells you how the local authority has been treating them.
