Data · 2025 planning decisions
Planning Approval Rates by County
89.6% of decided planning applications were granted in Ireland in 2025. But the national figure hides a wide spread: Leitrim granted 96.1% while Kildare granted 79.3%, which means an applicant in Kildare was about 5.3 times more likely to be refused than one in Leitrim.
Grant rate by county, 2025
| County | Granted | Refused | Grant rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leitrim | 224 | 9 | 96.1% |
| Tipperary | 1,051 | 52 | 95.3% |
| Cavan | 593 | 30 | 95.2% |
| Sligo | 400 | 23 | 94.6% |
| Monaghan | 450 | 27 | 94.3% |
| Clare | 954 | 65 | 93.6% |
| Donegal | 1,887 | 129 | 93.6% |
| Kilkenny | 739 | 52 | 93.4% |
| Laois | 561 | 42 | 93% |
| Cork | 2,466 | 196 | 92.6% |
| Mayo | 1,027 | 82 | 92.6% |
| Offaly | 428 | 40 | 91.5% |
| Carlow | 299 | 30 | 90.9% |
| Waterford | 670 | 70 | 90.5% |
| Limerick | 1,097 | 118 | 90.3% |
| Meath | 1,135 | 128 | 89.9% |
| Galway | 1,803 | 240 | 88.3% |
| Dublin | 4,987 | 722 | 87.4% |
| Kerry | 1,003 | 148 | 87.1% |
| Wicklow | 872 | 137 | 86.4% |
| Louth | 689 | 111 | 86.1% |
| Westmeath | 435 | 72 | 85.8% |
| Roscommon | 396 | 66 | 85.7% |
| Wexford | 1,156 | 204 | 85% |
| Longford | 213 | 38 | 84.9% |
| Kildare | 865 | 226 | 79.3% |
Counties with fewer than 50 decided applications are excluded. Grant rate is granted as a share of decided applications (granted + refused), so pending, withdrawn and invalid applications do not distort it.
What the spread means
The counties at the top of the table are rural and, with the exception of Tipperary, comparatively small: Leitrim, Tipperary and Cavan all granted more than 95% of what they decided. The counties at the bottom are under the heaviest development pressure in the state, where zoning, density and rural housing-need policies bite hardest.
Dublin is the instructive case. With 8,073 applications it lodges by far the most of any county, yet its grant rate of 87.4% sits close to the national average. Volume and refusal are not the same thing.
What the table cannot tell you is whether a refusal was deserved. A high-refusal county is not necessarily harder on reasonable proposals; it may simply receive more speculative ones. That is why the useful comparison is not your county average but what your council decided on similar developments near your own site.
Method and source
Figures are taken from the national planning applications dataset published by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, which aggregates the registers of all 31 planning authorities. Snapshot taken 2026-08-30, covering applications received between 1 January and 31 December 2025.
Decision wording differs between authorities, so decisions are classified by substring: anything containing "grant" or "conditional" counts as granted, anything containing "refus" as refused. Applications still pending, withdrawn or declared invalid are excluded from the rate but included in the lodged total.
The dataset lags the councils' own registers by one to two weeks, so late 2025 decisions may be under-counted slightly. Figures are reproducible from the source: the script that builds this snapshot is in the repository as scripts/build-stats-snapshot.mjs.
Free to reuse with attribution to Permission.ie. If you are a journalist or researcher and want the underlying data in another format, get in touch.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of planning applications are approved in Ireland?
89.6% of decided planning applications were granted nationally in 2025: 26,400 granted against 3,057 refused, out of 39,685 applications lodged. The rest were still undecided, withdrawn or invalid at the time of the snapshot.
Which county refuses the most planning applications?
Kildare had the lowest grant rate in 2025 at 79.3% of decided applications, refusing 226 of 1,091. Leitrim had the highest at 96.1%. An applicant in Kildare was roughly 5.3 times more likely to be refused than one in Leitrim.
Why do approval rates vary so much between counties?
The Development Plan is the main driver. Rural counties with permissive one-off housing policies grant a high share of applications, while counties under strong development pressure apply zoning, density and rural housing-need policies more strictly. The mix of application types matters too: a county with many straightforward domestic extensions will show a higher rate than one with contested housing schemes.
Does a high refusal rate mean my application will be refused?
No. These are county-wide averages across every kind of development. Your own odds depend on whether the proposal complies with the Development Plan, the zoning of the site, and the design. The most useful signal is what your council has recently decided for similar developments near your site, which you can check on any county page.
Related
See which councils stop the clock most often, check what your council has recently decided on your county page, or find out whether you need permission at all with the exemption checker.
