Planning Fees

We expect to receive a larger than normal volume of applications in the run-up to this date. As many applications are often submitted without all of the information needed to be valid on receipt, confusion can arise as to what fee is payable. 

The fee regulations make clear that the fee is payable when the application is made. Legal principles and decisions by the Court of Appeal have established that this is the date at which the application is submitted with all necessary information to be considered – ie when it is “valid”. The correct fee is therefore the fee on the working day that all necessary information (including the fee) for the application is received by the local planning authority, not the date on which it was first submitted or the date on which the local planning authority assessed whether the application was valid.

All applications which are received with sufficient information to make them valid prior to the Wednesday 1 April will be subject to the fee due before 1 April irrespective of when we assess whether they are valid. Similarly any application which is received on or after Wednesday 1 April will be subject to the higher fee. 

Our working hours are 9am until 5pm so applications sent to us after 5pm will be received the next working day. 

Due to the volume of cases likely to be received, there could be some delays in assessing whether applications are valid, which in turn could delay the submission of information necessary to validate them and so result in the higher fee being payable for applications which were first submitted prior to Wednesday 1 April. 

Therefore, where we take longer than 5 working days to issue an “invalid” letter, we will honour the lower fee due (the financial year 2025-2026 fee) where the following criteria are met:

• The application is received by East Herts District Council prior to 26 March (applications received between this date and Wednesday 1 April are considered unlikely to have been able to receive the necessary information to make them valid prior to Wednesday 1 April)
• The application was received by East Herts District Council after Sunday 1 March (application received prior to that date are considered to have had adequate time to provide information necessary to validate the application)
• All information necessary to make the application valid is received by East Herts within 21days of the “invalid” letter being issued.

This means that for applications received between Sunday 1 March and Wednesday 25 March, where we take longer than 5 working days to issue an “invalid” letter and you provide the information within 21days of the letter being sent, the fee prior to Wednesday 1 April 2026 will be due. 

We have prepared a flowchart showing this approach below:

The Planning Service charges discretionary fees relating to a number of other services, primarily the pre-application advice service. 

These fees and charges will be changing on Wednesday 1 April and are available on the below webpage.

On Wednesday 1 April the charges listed in our pre-application advice service pages will be updated. The new fees will be payable on all service requests received on or after Wednesday 1 April.