What is the payment service?

The payment service provides a standardised set of payment options across all local authorities, so applicants are able to pay quickly and easily.

Our dedicated team are on hand to process phone payments during business hours, online payments and bank transfers can be made at any time to suit you.

You may already be familiar with our Nominate service¹, which allows you to nominate other people to pay planning application fees (e.g. your client or finance department). Nominate is also offered as a standardised payment method for all applications.

And finally, you even automatically receive a receipt for your payment, regardless of your chosen payment option. Simple.

We send applications and payments to the relevant local authorities together, as soon as we have confirmed successful payment. This keeps the process rapid, succinct and tidy and prevents problems which arise from missing information. It also allows authorities to start validating your applications as soon as they get them. The application status in your Planning Portal account shows you whether the authority has received your application and we also email you once it’s been sent from us and downloaded by them.

There is a service charge for submitting some planning applications using Planning Portal, payable by the applicant on any application which attracts a fee of over £100. Applications where no fee is payable, will be sent directly to the local authority with no service charge applied.

Application bands

Planning Portal application types sit within three bands, reflecting our assessment of their complexity and the level of capability typically required to support them:

Band 0 - £0 for eligible application types there is no Planning Portal charge
Band 1 - £99 inc VAT for less complex application types
Band 2 - £149 inc VAT for application types with more complex requirements and greater platform capabilities.

The majority of applications received through Planning Portal will either be free or in Band 1.