Compiled from Department for Infrastructure (DfI) Northern Ireland Planning Statistics, 2016/17–2024/25. Published 15 July 2026.

Every three months, the Department for Infrastructure quietly publishes a set of numbers that shape whether homes get built, whether businesses can expand, and how long ordinary people wait to hear back on an extension or a new build. Pulled together across nine years of bulletins, those numbers tell a clear story: fewer people are applying, and the ones who do are waiting longer than the system promises — even as one part of it has genuinely improved.

Fewer Applications, Year on Year

Planning applications received across Northern Ireland peaked at 13,600 in 2021/22, a post-pandemic surge as restrictions lifted. Since then, receipts have fallen for three consecutive years, down to 9,716 in 2024/25 — a drop of roughly 29% from that peak, and around 25% below the 2016/17 starting point of this dataset.

The fall isn’t confined to one type of development. Local applications — extensions, single dwellings, small commercial changes — make up the overwhelming majority of the total and have declined in step with it. Fewer applications can mean several things at once: fewer people building, tighter household budgets, or simply people being put off by what comes next.

Ordinary Decisions: Missing the Target Every Year Since Covid

The statutory target for a standard (“local”) planning decision is 15 weeks. In the years just before the pandemic, councils came close — 14.0 weeks in 2019/20, the best result in this dataset. Since then, the average has sat between 17.8 and 20.8 weeks, and shows no sign of returning to target.

In plain terms: someone applying for a straightforward extension or minor change today waits, on average, four to six weeks longer than the law says they should.

Major Developments: The One Genuine Improvement

Major developments — larger housing schemes, significant commercial or infrastructure projects — are meant to be decided within 30 weeks. Historically this target has been missed by a wide margin: 59.0 weeks in 2018/19, nearly double the target. But this is also where the system has shown its clearest improvement. By 2024/25, the average had fallen to 39.6 weeks — still over target, but the lowest figure recorded since councils took over planning powers in 2015.

Why this matters beyond individual applicants
Major and regionally significant applications are where large-scale infrastructure and housing decisions sit. A planning system that takes 40+ weeks to decide these cases has a direct bearing on how quickly capital projects — from housing developments to transport infrastructure — can move from proposal to delivery, at a time when Northern Ireland’s capital budget is already under sustained pressure.

A System Where Council-Level Accountability Is Hard to Find

DfI’s bulletins report how many of Northern Ireland’s 11 councils met each target — but not which ones. A reader is told “three of 11 councils met the 15-week target in 2024/25,” without being told whether their own council was one of them. That detail exists only in accompanying spreadsheets that aren’t reproduced in the bulletin text itself, meaning most people encountering these statistics have no way to see how their own area compares.

Where named, council-level figures could be traced — through individual councils’ own performance reports and independent coverage — a consistent pattern emerged: rural councils such as Mid and East Antrim, Antrim and Newtownabbey, and Fermanagh and Omagh performed consistently faster and had higher approval rates, while Lisburn and Castlereagh recorded the steepest deterioration of any council, with local processing wait times reported to have nearly tripled since 2019/20.

Council by Council: Who’s Fastest, Who’s Slowest

DfI’s bulletins report how many councils meet each target nationally, but rarely name them in the headline figures. Pulling together individual council self-assessment reports and independent press coverage of the underlying DfI data gives a clearer, though not perfectly uniform, picture — the figures below come from different snapshot years, noted in each caption.

Antrim and Newtownabbey was fastest at 10.4 weeks, comfortably inside the 15-week target. Lisburn and Castlereagh was slowest by a wide margin at 48 weeks — more than three times the target, and, per Irish News reporting on DfI figures, nearly triple its own 2019/20 wait time of 17 weeks.

A consistent rural–urban split runs through the approval-rate data too. Mid and East Antrim, Fermanagh and Omagh, and Antrim and Newtownabbey — all rural or semi-rural councils — each approve more than 63% of applications on aggregate. Belfast and Lisburn and Castlereagh, both urban councils facing higher-density and more contested proposals, sit lowest at 58.4% and 47.6% respectively.

On major applications specifically, DfI figures cited in Mid and East Antrim’s own 2023/24 self-assessment report show Antrim and Newtownabbey (21.1 weeks) and Fermanagh and Omagh (22.9 weeks) both beating the 30-week target that year, against a Northern Ireland average of 46.5 weeks. Mid and East Antrim itself recorded 67.4 weeks that year — a result the council attributed to one unusually complex case, not a systemic pattern, given its consistent lead on local applications and enforcement.

Council	Local Wait (snapshot)	Approval Rate (aggregate)	Pattern
Mid and East Antrim	—	71.5%	Consistent top performer on speed and enforcement
Antrim and Newtownabbey	10.4 weeks	63.8%	Fastest local processing; also fastest major
Fermanagh and Omagh	—	65.6%	Regularly meets major target
Mid Ulster	19.2 weeks	—	Moderate, in line with NI average
Ards and North Down	17.4 weeks	—	Slight deterioration since 2019/20
Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon	20.2 weeks	—	38% slower than 2019/20
Belfast	—	58.4%	High volume, urban density pressures
Causeway Coast and Glens	23.0 weeks	—	Mid-to-lower performer
Lisburn and Castlereagh	48.0 weeks	47.6%	Steepest deterioration of any council since 2019/20

Dashes indicate figures not sourced for this article. Derry City and Strabane and Newry, Mourne and Down are not included here as no directly comparable figures for these snapshot periods were sourced.

The Numbers at a Glance

Year	Applications Received	Local Wait (target 15wks)	Major Wait (target 30wks)
2016/17	13,037	—	69.0 weeks
2017/18	12,933	~15.1 weeks	~50.0 weeks
2018/19	12,541	14.8 weeks	59.0 weeks
2019/20	12,207	14.0 weeks	52.8 weeks
2020/21	12,833	17.8 weeks	—
2021/22	13,600	—	—
2022/23	11,217	19.0 weeks	57.8 weeks
2023/24	10,025	20.8 weeks	46.5 weeks
2024/25	9,716	19.0 weeks	39.6 weeks

Dashes indicate figures not sourced for this article, not zero values. 2020/21 and 2021/22 activity was affected by coronavirus restrictions and a Planning Portal outage in early 2022; caution is warranted comparing these years directly with others.

Sources

• Department for Infrastructure, Northern Ireland Planning Statistics annual and quarterly statistical bulletins, 2016/17–2024/25 (infrastructure-ni.gov.uk)
• Department for Infrastructure, Northern Ireland Planning Statistics: Third Quarter 2025/26 Statistical Bulletin, published 1 April 2026
• Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA), 9,716 planning applications received in Northern Ireland during 2024/25
• Northern Ireland Assembly Research and Information Service, Planning Decision Times – comparison across the UK and Ireland, Paper 09/26, 29 January 2026
• Northern Ireland Audit Office, Planning in Northern Ireland, February 2022
• Mid and East Antrim Borough Council, Performance Self-Assessment Report 2023/24
• The Irish News, Planning decision wait times have tripled in parts of Northern Ireland since Covid, October 2025
• Quintin QS, NI Planning System: Worrying Trends and Stalled Applications, approval-rate analysis 2017/18–2024/25 (quintinqs.com)

Compiled and fact-checked against published Department for Infrastructure statistics. Figures not directly sourced from an official bulletin are marked accordingly. Where a figure could not be confirmed, it has been omitted rather than estimated.