Our DA Data Coverage, State by State

When you are evaluating a data provider, the honest questions are: how many records, from which councils, how far back, which fields are actually populated, and how often is it updated. This post answers those directly for Council DA.

The headline numbers

• 3.97 million development application records
• 290+ councils across all 8 states and territories
• Records reaching back 36 years for the longest-running councils
• Scrapers run Monday, Wednesday, and Friday — most portals reflected within 24 hours

Where the depth is

Coverage is not uniform, and pretending otherwise would be marketing rather than data. Victoria is our deepest state at roughly 2.2 million records, followed by Queensland (~686K) and New South Wales (~661K). NSW is additionally enriched from the state ePlanning open-data feed, which fills fields like estimated cost, dwelling counts, and storeys that many council portals omit.

The remaining states — SA, WA, Tasmania, the NT, and the ACT — are covered with smaller volumes that reflect their size and how much history their portals expose.

Field completeness, in the open

Every council is different: some publish estimated costs, some never do; some expose decisions, others only statuses. Rather than make blanket claims, we publish a per-council coverage explorer on our home page — pick your council and see the exact percentage of records carrying each field (lodgement date, decision, cost, dwellings, applicant, and more) before you spend a dollar.

How to sample it

The Free tier includes 25 API calls a day with no credit card, which is enough to test coverage for your area of interest. Suburb pages (linked from our hotspots directory) are fully public if you just want to browse recent activity in a specific area.