HOB: Height of Buildings

What the control sets

A single figure per parcel, usually in metres above existing ground. Where the LEP maps the height as a reduced level (RL) instead, the Dictionary measures it from the Australian Height Datum rather than from the ground, and the cap is then a flat plane at that level. It is a development standard, which in New South Wales is a specific thing: the consent authority cannot simply weigh it against the merits of a proposal, and departing from it requires a clause 4.6 request that satisfies its own test.

The map is part of the LEP, so the figure changes when the LEP changes — by a planning proposal, not by a decision on an application. Some LEPs add their own subclauses beneath 4.3 for particular sites or precincts, and a State Environmental Planning Policy can set a standard that displaces the mapped one. Read the clause as made in the LEP that applies to your land rather than the template version of it.

What counts towards the height, and what does not

The Dictionary defines building height as the vertical distance from ground level (existing) at any point to the highest point of the building — and it says explicitly that the highest point includes plant and lift overruns. What it excludes is a short list of thin things: communication devices, antennae, satellite dishes, masts, flagpoles, chimneys, flues and the like.

The exclusions are narrow and they are for slender elements, not for enclosed ones. A roof-top structure that encloses space — a plant room, a lift motor room, a communal roof pavilion — is part of the building and part of the height.

On a sloping site the cap follows the ground

“Ground level (existing) at any point” is the phrase to read twice. The height is not measured from a single datum, a street level or an average. It is measured vertically at every point of the building from the existing ground directly beneath that point, which means the cap is a surface parallel to the existing topography rather than a horizontal plane.

Two consequences follow. On a site that falls, the downhill end of the building has the same allowance measured from its own lower ground, so a level roof over a falling site will breach at the uphill end before it breaches at the lower one. And cut-and-fill does not move the datum: the measurement is from existing ground level, so filling a site does not buy height, and cutting it does not cost any.

Metres are not storeys, and the LEP maps metres

Clause 4.3 sets a distance. How many floors fit inside it is arithmetic done with your own floor-to-floor heights, and the arithmetic is sensitive: a residential floor-to-floor of roughly 3 m, a ground floor with commercial ceiling heights, a transfer slab, or a structural depth chosen for acoustic separation each change the answer by a whole level on the same mapped height.

So a mapped height that “obviously” suits six storeys may suit five once plant, a raised ground floor and any floor-to-ceiling requirement from the Apartment Design Guide are allowed for. The conversion is a design output, not a planning input.

Exceeding the mapped height

Because it is a development standard, the route is clause 4.6 — a written request lodged with the application. Under clause 4.6(3) the consent authority must be satisfied that the applicant has demonstrated that compliance is unreasonable or unnecessary in the circumstances of the case and that there are sufficient environmental planning grounds to justify the contravention, and it must keep a record of that assessment. Since 1 November 2023 the clause no longer includes the public-interest test or the Planning Secretary’s concurrence.

Whether the mechanism is available at all is the first check. An LEP can exclude a particular standard from clause 4.6, and clause 4.6(8) itself excludes complying development standards (so the 8.5 m Housing Code height cannot be varied), BASIX-related standards, clause 5.4 and clause 5.5. Clause 5.3(5) is not a variable standard either (source: DPE, Guide to Varying Development Standards, November 2023). The general shape of the test, and what it costs a feasibility, is set out on the New South Wales index.

Sources

• Standard Instrument — Principal Local Environmental Plan, clause 4.3 Height of buildings
• Standard Instrument Dictionary — “building height (or height of building)” and “ground level (existing)”
• Standard Instrument — Principal Local Environmental Plan, clause 4.6 Exceptions to development standards, as revised 1 November 2023
• NSW Department of Planning and Environment, Guide to Varying Development Standards (November 2023), sections 2.1 and 6.4

Related: floor space ratio is the standard that usually binds before the height does, and the zone decides whether the building type is permissible at all.