Overview
Planning Insights is a comprehensive representation of planning zone and overlay information applicable to land parcels and addresses across Australia. Planning Insights aims to provide insights to enable a greater understanding of how land can be developed and to inform about limitations and specific characteristics of planning sites.
Geoscape welcomes your feedback on the Planning Insights product. We also publish regular product development updates on our website ( www.geoscape.com.au ).
Release Summary
This product was released to customers on 31 March 2026 with data extracted on 24 March 2026.
Any issues that have been identified for this release are described in the Issues section.
Change Notifications
WA Flood overlay removals
The DWER‑003 flood overlay has been removed for selected LGAs in Western Australia where it is unlikely to indicate the need for a flood study in the traditional sense. This change has resulted in a reduction of approximately 37,000 WA flood overlay records.
ACT Environment overlay removals
~125,000 environment overlay records in the ACT have been removed.
SA Industry overlay removals
~616,000 industry overlay records in SA have been removed.
NSW Industry, Infrastructure and Environment overlay additions
~17,000 industry, ~101,000 infrastructure and ~220,000 environment overlay records have been added for NSW.
SA Environment overlay additions
~104,000 environment overlay records have been added for SA.
WA strata linkage changes
There have been some changes in the ‘site’ logic applied by our data supplier in WA. This has resulted in an increase in strata parcels linked to planning zone information by ~19,000 records.
Future Considerations
This section outlines enhancements or changes under consideration, but not planned into a specific release. For further details on future initiatives, please contact Geoscape Support.
New overlay_source attribute
Geoscape is investigating the inclusion of a new attribute called overlay_source, which would describe the source of the overlay in the planning_insights_overlays table.
This change will result in a minor increment to the product versioning from v1.0 to v1.1.
New zone_colour and zone_source attributes
Geoscape is investigating the inclusion of two new attributes called zone_colour and zone_source in the planning_insights_zoning table.
Zone Colour will provide a colour for each planning zone in hexadecimal format (e.g. ‘#A88484’), assigned on a scheme by scheme basis. Please be aware that this colour information is not consistent between planning schemes. For example, SA Commercial zones may have a different colour to NSW Commercial zones.
To assist in differentiating the planning schemas that provide the planning zone information, a Zone Source attribute will also be included that will provide the name of the zone source.
This change will result in a minor increment to the product versioning from v1.0 to v1.1.
Primary Zone Assignment Improvement
The planning_insights table currently provides a pi_zone_code attribute that provides a single zone code for a cadastre. Where a cadastre relates to multiple zones, a single zone code is consistently selected for the pi_zone_code.
We are investigating with our data provider the option of increasing the intelligence around this attribute so that it represents the planning zone with the largest area of overlap with the cadastre.