How long does a planning appeal actually take?

If you are advising a client on whether to appeal, one of the first questions you will be asked is how long it will take. The Planning Inspectorate publishes target timescales, and they are a reasonable starting point, but they describe an intention rather than an outcome.

So we measured it. This post looks at 41,996 decided appeals from 2021 to 2026, and reports how long each one actually took from the appeal start date to the date the decision was issued.

The headline numbers

Across the whole sample, the median appeal took 129 days, or about 18 weeks. Half were quicker than that, half were slower.

The more useful figure for planning a project is the ninth decile. One appeal in ten took 238 days or longer, around 34 weeks. If a client needs certainty about a date, that is the number to work to, not the median.

The range is wide. The fastest decision in the sample was issued on the same day the appeal started. The slowest took 156 weeks — just short of the three-year cut-off we used to exclude implausible outliers.

By procedure

Procedure is the single biggest factor, and it is worth understanding before you agree to one.

Written Representations appeals were fastest, with a median of 18 weeks. Inquiry appeals were slowest at 25 weeks, roughly 1.4 times longer.

That difference is not a criticism of the process. An inquiry involves evidence exchange, advocates, a sitting event and a longer decision. It exists because some cases genuinely need it. But if the timetable matters to your client, the choice of procedure is the lever with the most effect on it, and it is worth having that conversation early rather than after an inquiry has been set.

By local planning authority

There is meaningful variation between authorities. The tables below cover the 259 authorities with at least 50 decided appeals in the sample, which is the minimum we would want before drawing any conclusion.

Fastest authorities

Slowest authorities

City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council came out fastest at a median of 14 weeks, and Tunbridge Wells Borough Council slowest at 26 weeks.

A note of caution on reading those tables. The appeal timetable is run by the Inspectorate, not by the council, so this is not a measure of how efficient an authority is. What it mostly reflects is the mix of casework coming out of that area. An authority handling a lot of major residential schemes will appear slower than one dealing mainly with householder extensions, and that says more about the development pressure it faces than about the council itself.

Has it changed over time?

*2026 covers decisions up to the point this data was pulled, not a full calendar year, so treat it as an early read rather than a trend reversal.

Median times rose steadily across the period, from 15 weeks in 2021 to 20 weeks in 2025. Whether that has genuinely turned a corner in 2026 is not yet answerable from a partial year of data.

What this means in practice

Three things worth carrying into a client conversation.

Quote the ninth decile, not the median. A client who hears "about 18 weeks" and then waits 34 will remember that you got it wrong, even though you quoted the typical case correctly. Giving a range is more honest and easier to defend.

The procedure decision is a timetable decision. If speed matters more than the opportunity to test evidence orally, that trade off should be made deliberately and recorded.

Count from the start date, not the submission date. The figures here measure from the official start date. There is additional time before that, while the appeal is validated and started, which sits outside this measurement and is worth adding to any estimate you give.

How we measured this

The figures come from appeal decisions published by the Planning Inspectorate, indexed on Plan Archive. We measured the number of days between the recorded start date and the decision date for every case where both were present.

We excluded 8 cases, under 0.02% of the total, where a date was missing, where the decision date preceded the start date, or where the gap exceeded three years. The Inspectorate documents known data quality issues in its own casework data, and those exclusions are our attempt to remove the clearest of them rather than to correct them.

We looked at breaking these figures down by casework type as well as by procedure, but in this dataset almost every case in scope carries the same casework type value, so that split would not have told you anything a procedure breakdown does not already show. We have left it out rather than publish a table with one row.

We also intended to compare these figures against the Inspectorate's published target timescales. We could not find a current, precisely worded target for each procedure that we were confident citing correctly, so we have left that comparison out rather than guess at it. If you know of the current published targets, we would rather link to them than reconstruct them from search results.

We have used medians throughout rather than averages. A small number of very long inquiries would pull an average upwards and misrepresent the typical case. Every figure in this post is shown with the number of cases behind it, and we have not reported any breakdown with fewer than 30 cases.

This measures elapsed time only. It says nothing about how well any individual appeal was handled.

Look at the decisions yourself

Every appeal behind these figures is on Plan Archive, searchable by authority, procedure, outcome and the issues the inspector actually decided.

Search appeal decisions