Planning permits in Frankston City Council.

This is our home council. Our studio is at Carrum Downs, inside the Frankston municipality, and it is the planning scheme we have worked with longest and most often.

Frankston is a designated Metropolitan Activity Centre with real development pressure, sitting alongside established low-scale residential and low-lying land near the coast and the wetlands. That mix means two proposals a few streets apart can face very different assessments.

The overlays that matter in this municipality

Overlays are what quietly decide cost and programme. These are the ones that genuinely recur here — and what each one actually means for your drawings.

• Special Building Overlay — Flood-related. Council directs applicants to Melbourne Water for the applicable flood level, and that level drives your floor heights before you have drawn anything.
• Heritage Overlay — More than 70 heritage-listed properties sit under the Schedule to Clause 43.01. Fewer than the inner east, but where it applies it governs the street-facing form.
• Design and Development Overlay — Applies in defined pockets and sets built-form controls specific to those areas.

You can check which of these sit over your own title in about two minutes, free, before engaging anyone: search your address on the Victorian Government's planning property report. Send us the result and we can usually tell you whether a permit is likely from one conversation.

Local controls and quirks worth knowing

• Neighbourhood character is precinct-based, and Carrum Downs has four of its own. Precincts CD1 to CD4 each carry a separate guideline, referenced against Clause 15.01-5L of the Frankston Planning Scheme. A design that satisfies CD2 may not satisfy CD4 — a distinction routinely missed by firms working the area from a distance.
• Free pre-application meetings are offered, in Standard and Major categories. On a marginal proposal this is the cheapest hour available.
• Your Certificate of Title must be no more than three months old at lodgement — stricter than several neighbouring councils. An out-of-date title is an avoidable delay.
• Council runs a Priority Development Program supporting major applications.

Timing, fees and process

• VicSmart is offered, with a dedicated application pathway including subdivision lodgement through SPEAR.
• Where a decision goes to a council meeting rather than being decided under delegation, expect roughly three to four additional weeks.

Figures above are council-published at the time of writing and change — treat them as orientation, not gospel, and confirm current fees and requirements with council. We keep across them, but the council's own page is always the authority.

How we prepare a submission here

The way to move quickly through planning is not to make the drawings prettier — it is to make them answerable. Most delays are not design disputes; they are requests for further information, which stop the statutory clock until you respond.

So we start with the planning property report, establish the zone and overlays before design, get a feature and level survey underneath it, test the built form against the local character controls that apply to your precinct, and then assemble a submission that responds to each relevant ResCode standard — Clause 54 for a single dwelling, Clause 55 for two or more — rather than asserting compliance and hoping.

Read more on what a town planning set contains, multi-dwelling work under Clause 55, or the building permit stage that follows.

Suburbs we cover in Frankston City Council

Carrum Downs, Frankston, Frankston North, Frankston South, Langwarrin, Langwarrin South, Sandhurst, Seaford and Skye.

Suburbs we have built in, with their own local detail: Carrum Downs · Frankston · Seaford.

Working somewhere else? See all our service areas, or send us your address and we will tell you which council and controls apply.