Development Approval Explained: Read This Before You Sign

The gate that decides whether the lease works

You have found a tenancy. The rent works, the position works, the fit-out quote is in. The thing most likely to stop you now is not money. It is that the planning system may not let you use that building for what you want to do.

Most people meet this after they have signed. That is the expensive order to do it in.

This guide is general information for Australian pet business owners. It is not legal, planning, accounting, tax or financial advice, and it does not take account of your circumstances or your site. Australian development approval is set across state legislation, state planning instruments and local planning schemes, each published separately by a different body. This guide brings that fragmented material together in one place. It is based on publicly available information published by those bodies, verified on 9 August 2026, and linked at the point each fact is stated so you can read the original. We maintain those links and re-check them, but we do not control what those bodies publish, and planning instruments change. Planning outcomes are site-specific and discretionary. Two identical businesses on two streets in the same council can get different answers, and nothing in this guide predicts what an authority will decide. You remain responsible for your own position: confirm it with your council or a qualified town planner and make your own decision before you act. Petboost accepts no responsibility for any action taken on the basis of this article. If anything here is inaccurate, tell us and we will correct it.

1. What "development" actually means, and why you are probably doing it

In ordinary speech, development means building something. In planning law it means something much wider, and the part that catches people is this: changing what a premises is used for is itself development, even if you never pick up a hammer.

The Northern Territory writes it the most plainly. Under the Planning Act 1999 (legislation.nt.gov.au), development means an activity that involves "the establishment of, or a change in, the use of the land". Queensland says the same thing with different words: a "material change of use" means "the start of a new use of the premises", and that is one of the five limbs of development under the Planning Act 2016 (legislation.qld.gov.au).

So the florist that became a cafe and is now available for you is not a blank slate. It has an approved use, and you are proposing to change it.

Key Takeaway: The building does not decide what you can do in it. The planning instrument that applies to that address does. A vacant shop is not automatically available for dogs.

2. The shape is the same everywhere. Only the names change.

Every Australian jurisdiction runs the same seven steps:

1. Work out your pathway. This is the step that matters most and the one almost nobody does properly.
2. Prepare. Plans, and usually a written report explaining the effects of what you propose.
3. Lodge. Almost always through a state online portal now, not over a counter.
4. Assess. The authority checks your proposal against the planning instrument. Neighbours may be notified, depending on your pathway.
5. Decide. Approve, approve with conditions, or refuse.
6. Comply with the conditions. This is the real outcome, and it is covered below.
7. Appeal, if you are refused.

What changes between jurisdictions is the vocabulary, and searching for the wrong word is how people conclude they do not need approval.

3. The pathway triage, which is the whole point of this guide

Every jurisdiction has a fast lane and a slow lane. Getting onto the right one is worth more than anything else in this article. The difference is routinely a few weeks against many months, and in some cases the difference between an approval and a use that is simply not permitted.

There are four lanes. Not every jurisdiction has all four, and they are called different things.

Lane 1: no approval needed at all

The best outcome, and more common than people expect.

• WA has the cleanest version in the country. Every use in a zone is marked P, D, A or X in the scheme's zoning table. If your use is "P" and there is no building work, or the work is itself exempt, no development approval is required at all (legislation.wa.gov.au).
• The ACT is unique, because everything runs off the Crown lease rather than zoning. All ACT land is held under a Crown lease that names the purposes the block may be used for. If your lease already authorises the use, the Planning Act 2023 makes it exempt from needing development approval at all.
• Tasmania and the NT both mark uses as "No Permit Required" or "Permitted without consent" in their zone tables.
• NSW publishes an exempt change-of-use table: swapping between certain business categories is not treated as a change of use at all (planningportal.nsw.gov.au).
• Queensland calls it accepted development, which needs no application, although you must still comply with the scheme's requirements.

Lane 2: the fast certificate

• NSW's Complying Development Certificate is the headline case. It is a combined planning and construction approval for straightforward development, and critically it can be issued by a private registered certifier as well as by the council. The Department's own guide says complying development can be approved "in as little as 10 to 20 days" (planning.nsw.gov.au).
• South Australia's deemed-to-satisfy pathway is genuinely distinctive: if the proposal meets every listed criterion, the authority must grant consent. It is not a discretion.
• Tasmania's permitted pathway must be decided in 28 days, and it cannot be objected to by a neighbour.
• Victoria is the exception, and it matters. Victoria has VicSmart, but no state VicSmart class is a use, so a change of use can never be fast-tracked in Victoria. Do not plan around a Victorian fast lane for a change of use, because there is not one.

Lane 3: the ordinary merit application

The default. Your proposal is assessed against the planning instrument on its merits, usually with public notification, and neighbours can commonly object.

Lane 4: the heavy lane

Queensland's impact assessment is the clearest example, and it carries a warning worth repeating: in Queensland, if your use is not named in your zone's table of assessment, you fall into impact assessment by default, which is the slowest and most expensive lane, and the public gets to object.

Can the neighbours object?

This surprises people more than any other part of the process, so it is worth its own table. Objection rights track the pathway, not the business.

4. What your business is called decides which lane you are on

Here is the uncomfortable part. The pathway follows the land use classification, and for pet businesses the classification is frequently unresolved.

Two jurisdictions name pet grooming outright. South Australia's Planning and Design Code defines a "personal or domestic services establishment" as premises providing services related to "the cleaning and/or grooming of pets", lists "domestic pet grooming" as an example, and makes it a class of shop (code.plan.sa.gov.au). The ACT's Territory Plan gives "pet grooming salon" as an example of a personal service. South Australia is the only state with one state-wide instrument, so its answer holds in every council area, which is something no other state can offer.

The other six do not name it, and the consequences of the two possible answers are not small:

We are not going to tell you which side your business falls on, because no planning authority in those six jurisdictions has said. What we can tell you is that this single question is usually the most valuable one you will ask, and that your council can answer it for your specific address.

Boarding and daycare are clearer, and often worse. Boarding is an animal use everywhere. In Victoria, "domestic animal boarding" expressly "includes domestic animal day care", and it nests upward into animal husbandry and then into agriculture, so a Victorian dog daycare is an agricultural use in planning terms. That is not intuitive and it changes which zones will have you.

5. Nine things nobody tells a first-timer

1. A certifier is not the council. In NSW a registered certifier can issue a complying development certificate; in South Australia an accredited professional can grant planning consent. In Western Australia there is no such thing for development approval, only for building permits. Knowing whether your jurisdiction has a private route is worth weeks.

2. Planning approval and building approval are different things. You can hold one and not the other. In the ACT a certifier can lawfully issue a building approval for work whose use still needs a development application, which is exactly the trap it sounds like.

3. The clock stops. Every jurisdiction pauses its statutory clock when the authority asks you for more information. That is why published timeframes and real timeframes diverge so much. The single biggest lever you control is lodging a complete application.

4. Conditions are the real outcome. Approval usually arrives with conditions on hours, noise, waste, parking and animal numbers. A condition can make a business unviable, so read them before you celebrate.

5. Existing use rights are worth real money and almost nobody knows they exist. If the premises already lawfully operated as your use, you may be able to continue it even where it would now be prohibited. They die if the use stops. The clock is six months in Western Australia, twelve months in NSW, and two years in Victoria and Tasmania. So a tenancy that has sat empty for a long time may have lost whatever right it had.

6. Existing use rights do not mean approval-free. This is the most misunderstood point in the whole area. In NSW, an existing commercial use can be changed to another commercial use even where that use would otherwise be prohibited, but development consent is still required. The right makes the use possible, not automatic.

7. Neighbours may be notified, and objections cost time even when they fail.

8. If you are refused, there is an appeal, and it costs money. Every jurisdiction has a tribunal or court: the Land and Environment Court in NSW, VCAT in Victoria, the Planning and Environment Court and the cheaper Development Tribunal in Queensland, the State Administrative Tribunal in WA, the Environment, Resources and Development Court in South Australia, TASCAT in Tasmania, ACAT in the ACT and NTCAT in the Northern Territory. Watch the deadlines, because they vary wildly: NSW gives you around six months (lec.nsw.gov.au), Tasmania gives you 14 days.

9. Operating without approval is enforceable. Authorities can issue notices and orders requiring you to stop, and penalties are published in each planning Act. We are not going to dress that up as a scare story. It is simply a real risk that sits on the operator, not the landlord.

6. The lease trap, which is where the money is lost

The most expensive mistake in this entire subject is signing a lease before you know your pathway.

The pattern is always the same. An agent says the premises is zoned commercial. The landlord says the last tenant was a shop. Both may be perfectly true and neither answers your question, because your question is whether your use is permitted at that address, and only the planning authority can answer it.

Do this instead:

1. Ask the authority one specific question, in writing: for this address, in this zone, what land use category is my business, and what approval pathway does that put me on? Vague questions get vague answers.
2. Use the mechanism your jurisdiction provides for getting that in writing. Victoria has a section 97N certificate of compliance, decided on a 30 day clock. The ACT obliges the Authority, on a pre-application request, to tell you in writing whether your proposed use is consistent with the existing Crown lease. Most jurisdictions offer a free or cheap pre-lodgement meeting.
3. Make the lease conditional on approval. A conditional clause costs nothing at the negotiating table and has saved a very large number of people. If a landlord will not accept one, that itself is information.
4. Ask what the premises is currently approved for, not what the last tenant did. Those are different questions, and the second one is not evidence of the first.

7. What it costs and how long it takes

We have published only what each authority publishes. Where a jurisdiction does not publish a figure, we have said so rather than estimating, and we have not averaged across states to produce a national number, because that number would be invented.

Two things this table does not show, and both matter more than the headline numbers.

The fee is rarely the cost. In the ACT, a commercial fit-out also pays a public notification fee of $1,501.62, which is nearly three times the application fee itself, plus a lease search. Ask what the total is, not what the application costs.

Professional help is a market price and we are not going to quote one. A town planner, an acoustic consultant or a traffic engineer will each charge what they charge. Anyone publishing a national figure for that is guessing.

8. Who the players are, and when you need each

• The council, or in the ACT and NT the territory authority. They decide, and they are also the cheapest source of the answer you need. Pre-lodgement meetings are commonly free.
• A private certifier, where your jurisdiction has one. Faster, but only for development that already fits the standards. A certifier cannot exercise discretion, which is the whole point of the pathway.
• A town planner. Worth it when your classification is genuinely arguable, when you are on the merit pathway, or when you have been refused. For a straightforward permitted use in a clear zone, usually not.
• An acoustic consultant. Frequently required for animal uses, because noise is the condition that recurs most.

9. Start here

Run your business and your address through ABLIS, the Australian Business Licence and Information Service (ablis.business.gov.au). It is the federal front door, it is free, and it returns Commonwealth, state and local requirements together.

Then read the guide for your jurisdiction, because the pathway names, the clocks and the appeal deadlines are genuinely different in each:

Then find your own council. Our permits finder resolves a suburb or address to its council and tells you what that council requires, with the date we last checked it. We read all 539 Australian councils individually: 205 run an animal business permit, 297 do not, and 37 are still unconfirmed. If yours does not run one, planning approval is the path instead. That is a separate requirement on top of planning, and our council permit reference explains how the two fit together.

What we could not verify

We would rather tell you this than fill the gaps.

• How a grooming-only salon is classified in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. We read all eight instruments directly. None of those six names pet grooming, and no planning authority in them publishes an answer. Only South Australia and the ACT do.
• Whether a standalone commercial dog daycare is "animal keeping" in Queensland. On the text, day boarding is still boarding, which points that way, but nothing we read says so in terms.
• What any individual authority will decide about your site. This is not a research gap we can close. Planning is assessed on the merits of each case, and that is exactly why the answer has to come from your council rather than from us.

Verified 9 August 2026 against the sources below. Planning instruments change, and planning decisions are made on the merits of each site, so nothing here predicts what your authority will decide. Check the linked source and confirm your own position with your council or a qualified town planner before you act.

Sources

• ABLIS, Australian Business Licence and Information Service: ablis.business.gov.au
• NSW Planning, Complying development: planning.nsw.gov.au
• NSW Planning Portal, Exempt development: planningportal.nsw.gov.au
• NSW Legislation, State Environmental Planning Policy (Exempt and Complying Development Codes) 2008: legislation.nsw.gov.au
• NSW Legislation, Standard Instrument Principal Local Environmental Plan: legislation.nsw.gov.au
• Land and Environment Court of NSW, Development appeals: lec.nsw.gov.au
• Victoria Planning Provisions, Clause 73.03 Land Use Terms: planning.vic.gov.au
• Victoria Planning Provisions, Clause 63.06 Expiration of existing use rights: planning.vic.gov.au
• Victorian Legislation, Planning and Environment Act 1987 (Authorised Version No. 167): legislation.vic.gov.au
• Queensland Legislation, Planning Act 2016: legislation.qld.gov.au
• Western Australian Legislation, Planning and Development (Local Planning Schemes) Regulations 2015: legislation.wa.gov.au
• Government of South Australia, Planning and Design Code: code.plan.sa.gov.au
• Tasmanian Legislation, Land Use Planning and Approvals Act 1993: legislation.tas.gov.au
• Tasmanian Planning Commission, Tasmanian Planning Scheme State Planning Provisions, Table 6.2 Use Classes: tpso.planning.tas.gov.au
• ACT Government Planning, Development applications: planning.act.gov.au
• ACT Government Planning, Fees and charges: planning.act.gov.au
• Northern Territory Legislation, Planning Act 1999: legislation.nt.gov.au