Planning Permission for Storage Buildings: Grant Rates and Timescales (England)

As at 16 October 2026, councils in England granted 92.7% of the major and 90.7% of the minor planning applications they decided in “General industry, storage and warehousing” in the year ending June 2026 (our calculation). That official category also covers factories, so it is not a rate for self storage alone. It leaves out withdrawn applications, and only 20.4% of its major decisions were made inside the 13-week statutory period with no extension or other agreement.

A major application has 1,000 m² or more of new floor space or a site of one hectare or more; anything smaller is minor. This guide is general information, not advice on your project: ask the council and a planning adviser about any real site.

How often is planning permission granted for storage and warehouse buildings in England?

Councils in England granted 92.7% of major and 90.7% of minor decisions in “General industry, storage and warehousing” in the year ending June 2026, against 87.6% and 81.9% for all development of those sizes.

The rates are our calculation: granted divided by granted plus refused, from the council planning returns behind “Planning applications in England: April to June 2026”, published on 24 September 2026 by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (the Ministry). They rest on 659 grants in 711 major decisions and 1,287 in 1,419 minor decisions. Our decision counts match the Ministry’s own table of planning decisions by development type.

On 16 October 2026 we found no Ministry table that prints a grant rate for this category alone (we searched the release and the 17 sheets of the Live Tables workbook). The release gives one grant figure for “commercial developments”, which combines this category with offices, research and development and light industry, and with retail and service: 5,600 of 6,200 decisions, or 90%, were granted.

A major scheme has 1,000 square metres or more of new floor space (about 10,800 sq ft, our conversion) or a site of one hectare or more, as article 2 of the Development Management Procedure Order also says. For uses other than homes, the Ministry counts anything smaller as minor.

Pooled over the five years ending June 2022 to June 2026, the category’s major decisions were granted 93.5% of the time (4,070 of 4,354) and its minor decisions 90.9% (7,568 of 8,329), against 85.9% and 81.0% for all development of those sizes.

Over the eight years ending June 2019 to June 2026 the yearly major rate stayed between 91.5% (2024) and 95.7% (2019). The minor rate fell from 94.4% in 2019 to 89.0% in 2024 and was 90.7% in 2026.

A rate above 90% invites false comfort, so read it with these limits:

• Decisions only. In the year ending June 2026 councils recorded 16,935 applications of all kinds as withdrawn, called in or turned away, 5.8% of the 291,861 they decided. The return holds one withdrawn count for each council and quarter, so on 16 October 2026 we found no storage share of it.
• Every kind of decision. Outline permissions, reserved matters, full permissions and applications to vary or remove a condition all count, not only new full applications.
• A mixed category. The council return has councils record use classes B2 (general industrial) and B8 (storage or distribution) under this heading, so factories and industrial sheds are in it. The Ministry’s tables spell it “General industry, storage, warehousing”, and the Planning Inspectorate’s database uses “Major general industry/storage/warehousing” and a minor equivalent.
• Simple conversions sit outside it. A change of use with no building work, or only work that would be permitted development anyway, on a site of one hectare or less, is recorded as “change of use”, not under this heading. We infer that these rates describe schemes that create floor space or cover more than a hectare, not simple conversions.
• No self storage line. On 16 October 2026 we found no line for “self storage” in the Ministry’s council statistics (we searched the 334 column names of the open data, every cell of the 17 sheets of the Live Tables workbook and the Ministry’s release, notes and data dictionary). Our Class B8 entry reads self storage as falling within B8, which the category shares with B2.

How long does a council take to decide?

In England the statutory period is 13 weeks for a major application and 8 weeks for any other, but in the year ending June 2026 only 20.4% of major decisions in “General industry, storage and warehousing” came inside 13 weeks with no extension or other agreement.

The period is counted from the day after the council receives a valid application, and an agreed extension can lengthen it. Technical details consent and public service infrastructure development have their own, shorter periods, which this guide does not cover.

An application is valid only when the form, the required documents and the fee have all been lodged and paid. The periods become 16 weeks where it needs an Environmental Impact Assessment (regulation 68(2) of the Environmental Impact Assessment Regulations 2017). A council also cannot decide until its notice periods have run, for example 21 days after a site notice is first displayed.

You and the council can agree an extension in writing, unless you have already given notice of appeal, setting out when a decision is expected. A Planning Performance Agreement must be in place before you submit to take the application out of the statutory time limit, but a written extension of time can follow.

The Ministry calls all three kinds, including an Environmental Impact Assessment, a “performance agreement”. Its headline speed measure counts a decision as in time if it came within the statutory period or an agreed extension. Its statutory-only measure treats any decision made under an agreement as late. The shares below are our calculation from the council returns.

The two measures give very different answers. In the year ending June 2026, 94.2% of major decisions in “General industry, storage and warehousing” were made in time or within an agreed extension, but only 20.4% (145 of 711) were made inside 13 weeks with no agreement. An agreement was involved in 77.8% of them. For all major development the three figures were 91.2%, 19.3% and 77.0%.

Of the 553 major decisions with an agreement, 525 were made within the agreed time, so most agreed dates were kept.

For minor decisions the same year gave 90.0% in time or agreed, 40.3% (572 of 1,419) inside 8 weeks with no agreement and 53.9% with an agreement, against 87.6%, 39.8% and 52.7% for all minor development. In the year ending June 2019 the share inside the statutory period with no agreement was higher: 39.7% of major and 52.4% of minor decisions in the category.

What does an application cost?

The fee rises with the gross floor space created, from £309 to a maximum of £427,537, and a 1,000 m² building (about 10,800 sq ft) costs £9,226 to apply for in England from 1 April 2026 (our calculation).

The fee for a new building falls in fee category 2, “The erection of buildings”, unless the building has a category of its own, such as a home or a farm building. Which category a council applies is its call. The amounts for applications made from 1 April 2026 are:

• Up to 40 m² of new floor space, or none: £309.
• Over 40 m² and under 1,000 m²: £610 for each 75 m² (or part of 75).
• From 1,000 m² to 3,750 m²: £659 for each 75 m² (or part).
• Over 3,750 m²: £32,578 plus £196 for each 75 m² (or part) above 3,750 m², to a maximum of £427,537.

An outline application is priced by site area instead: £610 for each 0.1 hectare (or part) under one hectare, and £659 for each 0.1 hectare from one to 2.5 hectares. Gross floor space is measured externally across all storeys, including basements and garaging, and part of a square metre rounds up. The council decides which spaces count.

Fees rise each 1 April by the lower of the September consumer price index rise and 10%, rounded to the nearest £1, and apply to applications made on or after that date. The rise on 1 April 2026 was 3.8%.

As at 16 October 2026 two official pages still show older amounts: Schedule 1 on legislation.gov.uk prints the base amounts, and the practice guidance fees page was last updated on 16 April 2025. Use the government’s table for 1 April 2026.

A change of use with no building work has its own fee category, which our converting guide sets out. Scotland’s fees and times are in our Scotland guide. We did not check fees in Wales or Northern Ireland.

What must you send for the council to validate it?

In England a valid application needs a completed form, the national information requirements, the correct fee and any local information requirements the council has properly listed, and the statutory clock starts only then.

• National requirements. Plans and drawings (at least a location plan), an ownership certificate and agricultural land declaration, a design and access statement for some applications and a fire statement for some made on or after 1 August 2021, plus extra items for outline and Environmental Impact Assessment applications.
• Local requirements. A council’s own list counts only if it was formally adopted and published on its website less than 2 years before you apply, and each item must be reasonable for the scale of the development and about a likely material consideration.

On 16 October 2026 we found no number of days or weeks for validating an application in the practice guidance on making an application, the guidance on determining one, or article 34. The guidance says applications “should be validated as soon as practicable”.

If you dispute a council’s local-list demand, you can send an article 12 notice, and the guidance then counts the statutory period from when the council has the fee, the documents and the other information, leaving out the disputed item.

Does biodiversity net gain apply?

Biodiversity net gain applies in England unless a development is exempt, and from 6 August 2026 it does not apply to a site of 0.2 hectares or below unless the development affects priority habitat on the site.

It is mandatory under Schedule 7A of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, and developers must deliver a gain of 10%. Developments granted permission by a development order, which includes permitted development rights, are exempt, and from 6 August 2026 so are temporary developments (the whole development temporary, with permission for 5 years or less).

If you are not exempt, you submit a biodiversity gain plan after permission is granted. The council has 8 weeks to approve or refuse it and must approve it before development starts. The 6 August 2026 changes rest on one Defra page, and we did not read the practice guidance on biodiversity net gain.

What if the council refuses or is late?

In England you can appeal to the Planning Inspectorate if the council refuses, grants with conditions you object to, or does not decide in time. For most refusals the limit is 6 months from the date on the decision letter (12 weeks for householder and minor commercial appeals), and there is no fee.

GOV.UK allows an appeal for non-determination once 8 weeks have passed since the date the council said it received the application (13 weeks for a major project), or a different agreed deadline has passed. “There’s no fee for appealing.”

The limit is up to 6 months from the date on the decision letter, or from the date a decision was due where none was given, and 28 days if you received an enforcement notice before the refusal. The Order sets it in article 37(2): 12 weeks for a “householder or minor commercial appeal”, 28 days in the enforcement cases and 6 months in all other cases.

The Order defines a “minor commercial application” as one about an existing building in a listed use, with no change of use or change in the number of units, wholly at ground-floor level and with no increase in gross internal area. GOV.UK gives shop fronts and security shutters as examples.

A new storage building adds floor area, so we infer that the 6-month limit applies to it, not 12 weeks. That is our reading of the definition, which also names Part A uses of the 1987 Use Classes Order that we did not read, so ask the Inspectorate or a planning adviser about your scheme.

If the council is late, the planning guarantee is a policy that no application should spend more than a year with decision-makers, including any appeal: major applications decided in no more than 26 weeks, non-major in 16 weeks and appeals in 26 weeks. It “does not replace the statutory time limits”.

If you do not appeal, the fee is refunded when the application is still undecided after 26 weeks (major) or 16 weeks (non-major), unless a longer period was agreed.

How often does the Planning Inspectorate allow an appeal about a storage or warehouse building, and how long does it take?

Of 1,055 planning appeals in England that the Inspectorate typed as major or minor “general industry/storage/warehousing” and decided from 1 September 2021 to 28 August 2026, 38.2% of those that ended as allowed, dismissed or split were allowed, against 29.4% of the same outcomes among all 50,018 planning appeals. The median time from valid date to decision was 27.3 weeks over those five years and 20.5 weeks in the last 12 months.

These are our calculations from the Inspectorate’s Casework Database for England, last updated on 1 October 2026, which lists a selection of decided cases over five rolling years and leaves out cases in progress and those withdrawn or turned away. Its development type is the Inspectorate’s own category, which its data notes call “set by defined criteria, can be subjective and not always populated”, not a planning use class.

An allowed share describes appeals that were made, most of them after a refusal: 755 of the 1,055 were against a refusal of planning permission, and 35.6% of those that ended as allowed, dismissed or split were allowed. It is not the chance that a new application is granted, and the Inspectorate says “targets are not set for the percentage of allowed and dismissed cases”. A split decision counts in the total but not as allowed.

By size, 98 of 191 decided major appeals were allowed (51.3%) and 297 of 842 minor ones (35.3%). The major figure moves with each case: only 34 to 56 major appeals were decided in each 12-month period, so one appeal shifts the share by two to three points. In the 12 months to 31 August 2026, 63.6% of the 55 major appeals decided were allowed.

Recent decisions were faster than the five-year median suggests. For storage-typed appeals the median was 20.5 weeks in the 12 months to 31 August 2026 (24.2 for major and 19.0 for minor), against 17.4 for all planning appeals, and 72.7% were decided within 26 weeks of the valid date, against 82.5% of all planning appeals.

The Inspectorate’s own release of 30 July 2026, which covers every kind of case, gives a median decision time of 19 weeks for the 12 months to June 2026.

What changes in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?

Planning is devolved, everything above is for England, and the nearest published figures elsewhere are on different bases.

Wales. The Welsh Government’s Development management quarterly survey for January to March 2026 (first published on 6 July 2026) has a line for “Industry/Storage/Distribution (B1(b&c),B2, B8)”. Our sums for April 2025 to March 2026 are 28 major decisions (27 granted) and 220 “minor and householder” decisions (193 granted). That minor line includes householder applications, so it is not the English minor.

Scotland. The Scottish Government publishes planning application statistics by authority. The edition we found covers April to September 2025 and was published on 29 May 2026. Our Scotland guide reads it and gives Scotland’s statutory periods, decision times and 2026 fees.

Northern Ireland. The Department for Infrastructure and NISRA published planning statistics for April 2025 to March 2026 on 26 August 2026. Its “Industrial” type, which includes factories and warehousing, had 92 decisions and 90 approvals, with an average of 38.1 weeks to process against 19.8 for all applications. That time runs to a decision or a withdrawal, so it is not comparable with the English figures.

In Wales and Northern Ireland we did not check fees, biodiversity net gain or appeal limits, and in Wales we did not check decision periods.

How long can the whole planning process take?

Plan on the project’s clock rather than the council’s: the statutory period is one step of several, and a listed operator says getting consent can take 18 months to three years.

Big Yellow Group’s results for the year ended 31 March 2026, dated 18 May 2026, say that “to achieve a planning consent can take anything from eighteen months to three years” and that “local planning policy is favouring residential development over other uses”. They also say the company has “planning consent on nine of the 12 development sites”. That is one operator’s account of its own sites, not a UK average.

For one of those sites, Old Kent Road in London, its development table gives the dates: acquired in June 2022, application submitted in October 2023, consent granted in May 2026. That is about 31 months from application to consent (our calculation from the months printed). The table, read on 16 October 2026, gives no reason for the gap, so it shows one project’s wait, not a council’s decision time. Our site selection guide covers the same site.

Class R prior approval, the permitted development route for farm buildings, runs on its own clock, which this guide does not cover: see our Class R guide, and our container planning guide for open land. Our guide to starting a self storage business sets planning beside the rest of the programme, and what happens after consent, the build and then the fill-up, is in our guide to how long a new store takes to fill.

What do these numbers not tell you?

They do not tell you the chance that your application will succeed. Each figure counts something narrower or different from an application, and these limits come on top of those beside each figure.

• Refusals and appeals cannot be divided. Councils refused 184 storage applications in the year ending June 2026 (52 major and 132 minor), while the Inspectorate decided 220 appeals with a storage type in the 12 months to 31 August 2026. The two use different categories, so the second is not a share of the first.
• Linked appeals count separately. The database does not remove linked appeals: 70 of the 1,055 are “Child” cases and 37 are “Lead” cases. Another 53 have no recorded reason or link status.
• No reasons, no use. On 16 October 2026 we found no field for the council’s reasons for refusal, for the use (such as self storage) or for conversion against new build among the database’s 44 column names.
• Self storage inside the mix. 29 of the 50,018 planning appeals mention self storage in an appellant, agent or site-address field, and only 7 of those carry a storage type (our keyword count, not a classification). The storage types cannot be read as self storage.
• Dated guidance. The practice guidance pages on pre-application advice and on conditions were last updated in 2019. On 16 October 2026 the GOV.UK appeal guide pages showed no date in their text, and GOV.UK’s content records give public update dates in September 2015, with technical updates logged in 2026, so we cannot say when their wording last changed.

What this guide does not cover

• Other regimes. Planning obligations, highways, hazardous substances, building regulations, fire safety, flood risk and business rates. Our converting guide outlines building regulations, fire safety and flood risk, and our business rates guide covers rates.
• Environmental Impact Assessment screening. We did not check when a storage scheme needs one, which moves the period to 16 weeks.
• The Inspectorate’s procedural guides. It publishes one for appeals about applications dated on or before 31 March 2026 and one for those dated on or after 1 April 2026. We did not read either.
• Tables we did not read. We did not parse the Ministry’s tables on the quality of decisions or on permitted development, which could show prior approval volumes.
• Other nations’ rules. We checked only the published statistics for Wales and Northern Ireland, and only the title and date of Scotland’s.
• Costs beyond the fee. We give no price for the drawings, surveys or consultants an application needs, or for the building: our cost to build guide has the sourced building figures.
• A business plan. The planning position goes in the site section of a business plan: see our business plan guide.

Ask a planning adviser or solicitor about any real site.

Questions to put to your adviser

• Which use class and which fee category will the council apply to this scheme, and who decides which floor spaces count toward the fee?
• Will the council agree a Planning Performance Agreement or an extension of time, and what timetable will it set?
• What does the council’s published local validation list require for a building of this size on this site?
• Does biodiversity net gain apply to this site, or does an exemption (0.2 hectares or below, temporary, permitted development) apply?
• Does the scheme need Environmental Impact Assessment screening, which moves the period to 16 weeks?
• If the council refuses, is the appeal limit 6 months or 12 weeks, and which procedure (written representations, hearing, inquiry) suits the case?
• Are planning obligations or the Community Infrastructure Levy likely at this size?

Sources

All read on 16 October 2026.

• Council statistics: the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s Planning applications in England: April to June 2026 (Accredited Official Statistics, published 24 September 2026), with its statistical release and technical notes; the Live Tables on planning application statistics, which hold the open data and the data dictionary; and the Ministry’s guidance notes for the district planning matters return.
• Decision periods and appeal limits: the Development Management Procedure Order 2015, article 2, article 34 and article 37; regulation 68 of the Environmental Impact Assessment Regulations 2017.
• Practice guidance: determining a planning application, making an application, before submitting an application, use of planning conditions and the Community Infrastructure Levy.
• Fees: the government’s planning fees from 1 April 2026 and its fee table; the Fees Regulations 2012, regulation 18A and Schedule 1; the practice guidance page on fees for planning applications.
• Biodiversity net gain: Defra’s understanding biodiversity net gain and exempt developments.
• Appeals: GOV.UK’s appeal a planning decision, with how long you have to appeal, make an appeal and minor commercial development appeals.
• Planning Inspectorate: the statistical release of 30 July 2026 and the Casework Database with its data notes.
• Other nations: the Welsh Government’s Development management quarterly survey, January to March 2026; the Scottish Government’s planning applications statistics, April to September 2025; Northern Ireland planning statistics, April 2025 to March 2026 and the Department for Infrastructure’s annual publication.
• Operator: Big Yellow Group PLC’s results for the year ended 31 March 2026, dated 18 May 2026.