Residential planning applications on the rise: delivery risks for project teams
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Planning applications for new homes in England reached 335,387 units in 2025, a post‑covid and decade high and more than 120,000 above 2024, with Q4 2025 delivering a five‑year quarterly peak for affordable housing, according to TerraQuest’s Planning Application Index for the Planning Portal, which handles about 95% of submissions. The second half of 2025 outpaced the first by nearly 72,000 units, a 51% increase, signalling stronger developer confidence. TerraQuest, FMB and LPDF all warn, however, that high attrition from consent to completion, viability pressures and infrastructure constraints mean delivery will lag far behind the government’s 1.5 million‑home ambition.
Technical Brief
- TerraQuest’s Planning Application Index is the primary dataset underpinning these national housing application statistics.
- Q4 2025 delivered a five-year peak specifically for affordable housing applications, not just total units.
- 2025 recorded the highest annual total for affordable housing applications in the last five years.
Our Take
With roughly 95% of England’s planning applications flowing through Planning Portal, TerraQuest effectively provides a near-real-time barometer for housing-led infrastructure demand in our UK Infrastructure coverage, which can give contractors and materials suppliers earlier visibility of regional upswings than housing-start data alone.
The post‑Covid high in new-home applications and the five‑year peaks in affordable housing applications in England sit against a wider Infrastructure corpus where most UK housing pieces have focused on delivery bottlenecks and planning reform, suggesting that the current inflection is more about pipeline recovery than resolved capacity constraints on site.
SMEs now building under 10% of new homes, despite rising Federation of Master Builders confidence for 2026, implies that any acceleration towards the 1.5 million homes target will be dominated by volume housebuilders, which in turn tends to favour larger, standardised infrastructure packages over smaller, infill schemes in our recent UK project data.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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