June 2026 · Guide

Planning application categories explained (and which mean work for your trade)

A plain-English guide to the main UK planning application categories, with the trades and suppliers each one tends to put to work.

Why the application type tells you what is being built

Every planning application carries a type. It sits in the reference, on the council register, and in the decision notice. Most people read past it. For anyone selling into construction it is one of the most useful single fields on the record, because the type tells you roughly what the work is, how far off it is, and which trades will be needed first.

A householder application is a loft conversion or a rear extension. A major application is a housing estate or a commercial shed. An outline consent is a site that has been agreed in principle but has no buildable detail yet. A prior approval is often an office becoming flats. Read the type correctly and you can tell whether a record is a job for next month or a job for two years away, and whether it is your job at all.

This guide walks through the categories you will actually see on UK registers, what each one means in practice, and which trades and suppliers it tends to mean work for. The categories below apply to England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland use the same broad shapes under their own legislation, with different thresholds in places.

Householder applications: extensions, loft conversions, garden rooms

A householder application covers alterations or extensions to a single existing house and its garden, where the work goes beyond what permitted development allows. Rear and side extensions, loft conversions with dormers, garden outbuildings, hard standing and porches all sit here. The forms are shorter, the fee is lower, and the council usually decides within eight weeks. Householder applications are the single largest category on most registers. In the year to December 2024, English authorities decided 161,200 householder applications, around 51% of all decisions, and granted 89% of them (MHCLG planning statistics).

These are short-lead, high-volume jobs. The household has already committed money to drawings and a fee, so the work is real and usually starts within months of approval. For a small builder, a groundworks contractor digging footings, a roofing contractor on a new pitched or flat roof, or a builders' merchant or material supplier quoting bricks, blocks and timber, this is the bread-and-butter feed. The value per job is modest, but the volume and the short timeline make householder applications the easiest category to convert into actual orders.

• Means work for: general builders, groundworks, roofers, glazing and window installers, plasterers, electricians and plumbers on the fit-out, and merchants supplying the lot.
• Timeline: weeks to a few months from approval.
• Signal to watch: householder volume in your postcodes is a clean proxy for domestic RMI demand.

Full applications: the detail is all there

A full application (often logged as full planning permission) sets out the complete, detailed proposal in one go: siting, design, materials, access, drainage, the lot. If it is approved, there is nothing left to agree in principle. The applicant can discharge any conditions and build. Full applications cover everything from a pair of new houses to a new commercial unit, a shopfront, or a change to an existing building that is too large for the householder route.

For trades, a full consent is the most actionable type after householder, because there is no further design stage standing between approval and a start on site. When you see a full permission granted in your area, the scope in the description is real and costable now. Larger full applications that cross the major thresholds (covered below) are where small developers and main contractors line up their supply chains, and where groundworks contractors and material suppliers get the earliest call.

Outline applications: agreed in principle, no detail yet

An outline application asks the council to agree the principle of developing a site before anyone spends money on detailed design. It is used mostly for larger schemes, typically housing. The applicant can reserve some or all of the detail for later. Those reserved details fall under five headings defined in the legislation: access, appearance, landscaping, layout and scale (Planning Portal).

An outline permission on its own does not mean work is about to start. There is no buildable detail, no contractor appointed, often no developer committed beyond the landowner or promoter. What it does tell you is that a site has cleared its biggest planning hurdle. For small developers hunting for sites, an outline consent is a strong buy signal. For trades and material suppliers, it is an early-warning flag: log it, and watch for the reserved matters application that turns it into a real job.

• Means work for: nobody immediately. It is a pipeline marker, not a live job.
• Best use: track outline consents in your patch so you are already aware of the site when detail lands.
• Timeline: months to years before a spade goes in.

Reserved matters: the outline turns into a buildable scheme

A reserved matters application supplies the detail that an outline permission left open. It must be submitted within three years of the outline being granted, unless the permission says otherwise (Planning Portal). Once reserved matters are approved, the scheme is fully consented and can be built. This is the moment an abstract red line on a map becomes a layout with house types, road levels, materials and drainage.

For the supply chain, reserved matters is the type to act on. The design is now fixed, plot numbers and house types are known, and the developer is committing to delivery. This is when groundworks contractors price the roads, sewers and foundations, when roofing contractors and cladding contractors get specified, when M and E contractors quote the services, and when material suppliers lock in volume orders. If you tracked the outline, the reserved matters application is your cue to make contact before the tender list closes.

Major vs minor: what the DMPO 2015 thresholds actually say

Major and minor are not separate application types. They are a size classification that sits on top of full, outline and reserved matters applications, and it is defined precisely in law. Under article 2 of the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015, a development is major if it involves any one or more of the following.

Residential: 10 or more dwellings, or a site of 0.5 hectares or more where the number of dwellings is not yet known. Non-residential: 1,000 square metres or more of floor space to be created, or a site of 1 hectare or more. It also covers minerals and waste development. Anything that does not meet these tests, but is bigger than a householder job, is classified as minor.

The distinction matters commercially because it tells you the scale of the spend. A major consent means a sustained programme: phased groundworks, structural frames, roofing and cladding packages, mechanical and electrical fit-out, and repeat material deliveries over months or years. A minor consent is a smaller, faster job, often a single building or a handful of plots. Filtering a register by major status is the quickest way for a small developer or a contractor chasing larger packages to find the schemes worth a phone call, and there is far less of it to wade through. Authorities decide only a few thousand major applications a quarter in England (MHCLG planning statistics).

• Major (residential): 10+ dwellings, or 0.5 ha+ where unit count is unknown.
• Major (other): 1,000 sqm+ of new floor space, or a 1 ha+ site.
• Minor: above householder scale but below the major thresholds.
• Means work for: every trade, but at programme scale. The bigger packages and longer-term supply deals live here.

Prior approval: permitted development that still needs a check

Some changes are allowed in principle under national permitted development rights, but the council still gets to check specific points such as flooding, transport, contamination or noise before work proceeds. That check is called prior approval. The application is narrower than a full application and runs on tighter deadlines. The best-known route is Class MA, which lets a Class E commercial unit (shops, offices, light industrial and similar) change use to homes. Since 5 March 2024 there is no floor space cap on Class MA and no requirement for the building to have been vacant, though the property must have been in Class E use for at least two years and listed buildings are excluded (House of Commons Library; GOV.UK).

Prior approvals, especially commercial-to-residential conversions, mean real refurbishment work even though no new shell is being built. The change of use is just the consent. The flats still have to be created. That is where M and E contractors rewire and re-service the building, where material suppliers feed the fit-out, and where insulation, partitioning, glazing and sometimes cladding contractors come in to upgrade the envelope. A run of Class MA approvals in a town centre is a reliable signal of conversion work coming through.

Listed building consent and change of use: specialist work and conversions

Listed building consent is a separate permission required for the demolition, alteration or extension of a listed building in any way that affects its special architectural or historic interest, under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990. It is often submitted alongside a planning application rather than instead of one. The work tends to be specialist: heritage roofers, lime plasterers, joiners, conservation-grade glazing and traditional material suppliers, because standard modern products are frequently not acceptable. For a roofing contractor or material supplier who can work to conservation standards, these records flag higher-value, lower-competition work.

A change of use application asks to use a building or land for a different purpose, for example a shop to a restaurant, or agricultural buildings to commercial units, where permitted development does not cover it. Some changes of use involve little building work, but many trigger a full internal refit, new services, accessibility works and a new shopfront or envelope. Reading the description matters here: a change of use with associated works can mean as much for M and E contractors, fit-out trades and material suppliers as a full application would.

Turning the application type into a lead

The category is only useful if you can filter on it. Reading every council register by hand to separate householder jobs from majors, or to catch every Class MA prior approval in your area, is not realistic across the 320-plus authorities that publish daily. That is the job SiteLens does. Every new UK application is classified by trade, project type and an estimated value band, so you can ask for exactly the categories that mean work for you and ignore the rest.

A roofer might watch householder and full applications in a handful of councils nearby. A material supplier might track majors and reserved matters across a whole region. A small developer might want outline and major consents the day they land. You can browse any council to see what is live right now, for example Birmingham or Lambeth, and read more about how the classification works on the features page.

The free tier lets you watch your patch and see the categories in action. Pro adds unlimited application views and daily email alerts filtered to your trades and areas, so the right type of application lands in your inbox the morning it is published. Start free and pick your categories.

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