Planning

Disclaimer

Geoscape Australia believes this publication to be correct at the time of printing and does not accept responsibility for any consequences arising from the use of the information herein. Readers should rely on their own skill and judgement to apply information to particular issues.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission of Geoscape Australia.

Overview

Planning provides detailed planning zone codes and descriptions for parcels of land across Australia. By representing the detailed planning classification for each cadastral parcel, as well as links to the relevant planning scheme/instrument, Planning provides a simple lookup for the classification on sites nationally.

Planning is created by combining Geoscape Australia’s Cadastre product with planning zones defined by State, Territory or local governments and is released on a quarterly schedule against the latest Cadastre data, with planning zone source data updated bi-annually.

Geoscape welcomes your feedback on the Planning product. We also publish regular product development updates on our website ( www.geoscape.com.au ).

Release Summary

This product was released to customers on 30 June 2026 with data extracted on 25 May 2026.

• This release is a full national data population for Version 1.3 of the Planning product, described by the Planning Product Guide v1.3.

Any issues that have been identified for this release are described in the Issues section.

Change Notifications

Versioning Update (Starting June 2026)

Beginning June 2026, all data products will transition to a standardised versioning format: MAJOR-MINOR-EXTRACT (e.g., 004-000-001). This approach provides a clear and consistent structure, making it easier for users to identify product versions and understand update levels at a glance. The change is intended to improve transparency, reduce ambiguity, and support more efficient integration and usage of our data products.

Implementation of New Zip File Naming and Packaging Standards (Starting August 2026)

As part of ongoing improvements to product consistency and packaging standards, updates to zip file naming conventions and internal packaging structure will be implemented, starting in August 2026.

Zip File Naming

Two standard naming patterns will be used, depending on whether an extract contains spatial information:

• Spatial Tables:

{PRODUCT-NAME}_{RELEASE YYYYMM}_{REGION}_{CRS}_{FORMAT}_{VERSION MAJOR-MINOR-EXTRACT}.zip

• Aspatial (Insights) Tables:

{PRODUCT-NAME}_{RELEASE YYYYMM}_{REGION}_NODATUM_{FORMAT}_{VERSION MAJOR-MINOR-EXTRACT}.zip

Packaging Structure

All zip files will follow a simplified, flat directory layout:

• No nested folders

• The primary data file will be located at the top level of the zip.

Note: The product package will no longer include supporting content.txt files.

These changes ensure consistent packaging across all products, reduce complexity, and support improved automation and user experience.

Issues

New Issues

No new issues.

Resolved Issues

No resolved issues.

Known Issues

Truncated secondary_zone_description value in NSW for ESRI Shapefile and MapInfo TAB formats

The planning zone data for NSW includes seven records that have a secondary_zone_description value of 'MOUNT PENANG PARKLANDS BULKY GOODS PREMISES; BUSINESS PREMISES (OTHER THAN MEDICAL CENTRES); CHILD CARE CENTRES; COMMUNITY FACILITIES; EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENTS; FUNCTION CENTRES; HELIPORTS; KIOSKS; LANDSCAPE AND GARDENING SUPPLIES; MARKET; OFFICES; RECREATION FACILITIES; RETAIL PREMISES; RESTAURANTS; TOURIST AND VISITOR ACCOMMODATION'.

Geoscape increased the width of the secondary_zone_description attribute from 100 characters to 350 characters for the March 2024 release. The above value will not be truncated for File Geodatabase and GeoJSON formats. However, within ESRI Shapefile and MapInfo TAB file formats, there is a character length limit of 254 for strings. As the above value exceeds these file format limitations, the value is truncated to 'MOUNT PENANG PARKLANDS BULKY GOODS PREMISES; BUSINESS PREMISES (OTHER THAN MEDICAL CENTRES); CHILD CARE CENTRES; COMMUNITY FACILITIES; EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENTS; FUNCTION CENTRES; HELIPORTS; KIOSKS; LANDSCAPE AND GARDENING SUPPLIES; MARKET; OFFICES; REC'.

Queensland state-sourced data is not current

The state-sourced data for Queensland is from 2010 and is no longer maintained. Geoscape Australia has sourced local government data for 15 local councils with significant populations to remedy these currency issues, although the state-sourced data is still used for other areas of the state. We are continuing to look at expanding our supplies to include more current source data for Queensland into the future.

Commonwealth maintained areas not necessarily covered

Planning information may not be available for land held by the Commonwealth Government, as this land is not managed by state or local government authorities. For example, planning data is not available for the Jervis Bay Territory as the territory is maintained by the Commonwealth.

Cocos (Keeling) Islands data missing a cadastral polygon

Cocos (Keeling) Islands within the Other Territories data has a missing relationship between the cadastral polygon and planning data. This has occurred due to the cadastral centroid falling outside a planning zone boundary. This is a unique scenario as the cadastral parcel is much larger than the available planning boundaries in this area. This has caused the cadastral centroid to fall within a gap between planning zones and has resulted in no planning zone information being related to the parcel. Elsewhere across the country the cadastral parcels generally are the same size or smaller than the planning zones and do not experience this issue.

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.

Legacy ‘CAD’ naming

The planning table contains fields of ‘cad_pid’ and ‘cad_polygon_pid’, while the new Cadastre product has attributes of ‘cadastre_pid’ and ‘cadastre_polygon_pid’. We have input the new ‘cadastre_pid’ and ‘cadastre_polygon_pid’ values into the ‘cad_pid’ and ‘cad_polygon_pid’ fields respectively to not affect customer processes with attribute name changes. There is no current plan to change these field names in Planning.

Annex A – Release Counts

Additional, retired and total Planning counts and the percent change to the previous release have been listed in the table below.

TABLE	STATISTIC	ACT	NSW	NT	OT	QLD	SA	TAS	VIC	WA	TOTAL
planning	Additional	103	28,424	239	3	27,183	9,214	3,968	53,660	52,173	174,967
	Retired	30	16,651	109	3	12,741	5,998	3,179	42,075	47,694	128,480
	Updated	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
	Total	162,060	4,828,955	92,371	1,222	3,067,613	1,177,496	398,111	4,417,203	1,592,400	15,737,431
	% Change	0.05%	0.24%	0.14%	0.00%	0.47%	0.27%	0.2%	0.26%	0.28%	0.3%