Planning permission in Westminster starts at £548 for a householder application. Most homeowners stop there, assume that's the bill, and move forward with a project that ends up costing far more — or getting refused entirely. The real cost depends on a combination of factors that are almost impossible to assess without knowing what's sitting on your specific property record. Before you budget anything, it's worth taking a minute to see what constraints and approval patterns apply to your address — free, no signup needed.
The short version
- The £548 householder fee is just the statutory application cost — it's rarely the only cost
- Westminster has the densest concentration of listed buildings and conservation areas in the UK
- Listed building consent, professional fees, and repeat applications can multiply the true cost dramatically
The fee is the easy part
The £548 covers your householder planning application — full stop. It doesn't cover listed building consent, which is required for a huge proportion of Westminster properties and carries its own separate process. It doesn't cover a heritage statement, which many applications here will need. It doesn't cover a planning consultant, and in Westminster, most professionals will tell you that submitting without one is a risk most homeowners can't afford to take.
The council's design expectations are among the most demanding in the country. Applications that might sail through in other boroughs routinely get refused here on design grounds alone — and every refusal means starting the fee clock again.
Conservation areas and Article 4 Directions change the calculation
Almost the entire borough sits within a conservation area. That changes what counts as permitted development — works you could do elsewhere without any permission at all may require a full application in Westminster. Most homeowners don't realise how far this extends until they're already mid-project.
Layered on top of conservation area status in many parts of the borough are Article 4 Directions, which restrict external alterations even further. Whether your specific street or property is affected — and what that actually means for your project — isn't something you can easily read off a general guide. The best way to understand how that combination affects your chances is to check what Article 4 and conservation area restrictions mean for your specific project type.
Don't forget listed building consent
If your property is listed — and in Westminster, it very possibly is — you'll need listed building consent in addition to planning permission. There's no fee for this application itself, but the professional preparation costs can be substantial, and the scrutiny is intense.
Why similar projects on the same street get different outcomes
This is the part that genuinely surprises people. Two near-identical extensions, two houses apart on the same road, can have completely different outcomes — one approved, one refused. The reasons are rarely obvious from the outside. They come down to the specific constraints on each individual property, the case officer assigned, the quality of the application, and the precedents set by previous decisions nearby.
In a borough like Westminster, where the margin for error is thin and the cost of a refusal is high, understanding what's actually been approved and refused near your address isn't a nice-to-have — it's essential groundwork. WhatCanIBuild pulls together the approval record for your street so you can see what your neighbours got approved and what that means for your own odds — free, takes about a minute.
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