Data quality
Measured against the register
Planning data is only worth acting on if it matches what the council actually published. We check ours against councils’ own public registers and publish the result, including what it misses.
Last checked for new applications
4h
Every tracked area is within its freshness threshold.
Councils with data
102of 426
24% of UK planning authorities. Coverage is still expanding.
Applications held
14,650
6,566 submitted in the last 30 days.
What we hold is accurate
27 applications across 18 councils, each checked field by field against that council’s own register entry. Last run 24 September 2026.
| Field | Checked | Agreement |
|---|---|---|
| Application reference | 27 | 100% |
| Site address | 26 | 100% |
| Proposal description | 26 | 100% |
| Status | 23 | 100% |
| Link to the council record | 27 | 100% |
| Duplicate entries | 27 | 0% |
Typically 3.1 days behind the council
Measured from the date the council validated the application to the moment it first appeared in PlanningPing — a median of 3.1 days and a mean of 3.6384615384615375, across 26 applications.
Most of that interval belongs to the national aggregator we draw from, which republishes council registers on its own schedule. Our own checks run every fifteen minutes. For context, a planning application takes eight to thirteen weeks to determine.
Where the gaps are
Accuracy answers whether what we show is correct. It cannot answer whether anything is missing, so we test that separately, by taking a council’s complete published list and checking it against ours.
- We do not hold every application
- On the best-covered council tested, we held 86% of what it published over a sample week. Roughly half the shortfall was data we had not yet fetched, which closes as coverage expands; the rest never reached our upstream source at all.
- Some councils publish less often than others
- A council’s feed can stall for weeks at the source. Where that happens we show the same gap the source has, and cannot fill it.
- Coverage is still being built
- 102 of 426 planning authorities currently hold data. The national sweep runs hourly and works through the remainder.
- The data is not ours
- Every record originates in a local planning authority’s public register. We aggregate, score and route it — we do not originate it, and we link every application back to the council’s own entry so you can check.
How this is measured
Applications are sampled across councils, capped per council so no single busy authority dominates. For each, the council’s own register entry is retrieved from its planning portal and compared field by field. Agreement means the stored value matches the register; anything ambiguous is set aside for a person rather than scored in our favour. Results are stored against the applications they describe, so the audit can be re-run and compared rather than existing as a snapshot.