UK planning applications API: your options

Ways to get UK planning data

There is no single official national API for UK planning applications. Each council publishes its own register, usually on a web portal. These are the realistic options:

1. Council planning portals

Every local planning authority has a public search, often an Idox Public Access, Northgate or Agile portal. They are free and authoritative, but they are web pages rather than an API, the layout varies by council and you search one council at a time.

2. PlanIt

PlanIt collects applications from hundreds of UK council registers and offers a free JSON, CSV and GeoJSON API. You can filter by authority (auth), days back (recent), keyword (search) or a point and radius. It is the best free starting point; it is run as a community service, so keep traffic light and check its terms.

3. planning.data.gov.uk

The government's Planning Data platform has an open API. Coverage focuses on planning designations such as conservation areas and Article 4 directions; application data is only available for some councils so far.

4. A scheduled feed on Apify

Our UK Planning Applications actor wraps PlanIt into a ready-made job: pick councils, a postcode radius or keywords, run it on a schedule, and get the same columns every time through the Apify API, CSV, Excel or a webhook. You pay per result, with no Rowsift account.

Commercial data providers

Paid services sell cleaned, enriched planning data with alerts. They can make sense for large teams, but compare their prices with the free options above first.

Step by step

1. Decide what you need: one council, a postcode radius, or a keyword such as "solar".

2. For quick tests, call the free PlanIt JSON endpoint (example below).

3. For a weekly job, open the UK Planning Applications actor on Apify and set councils or a postcode plus radius.

4. Run it, then pull results from the Apify dataset API as JSON or CSV, or export to Excel.

5. Schedule it weekly and connect a webhook, Zapier, Make or n8n.

Real sample output

From a real test run of the actor. Full records have more fields.

Example input

{"search":"solar","recentDays":30,"maxItems":20,"includeDetails":true}