Zoning and the Land Use Table

What the control sets

Clause 2.3 of every principal LEP does two things. It gives effect to the Land Use Table at the end of the plan, and it requires the consent authority to have regard to the objectives for development in a zone when deciding an application on land in that zone. The zone itself is shown on the Land Zoning Map; the table is what the zone points at.

Because every principal LEP is made from the same Standard Instrument template, the zone codes mean the same thing everywhere — R3 is Medium Density Residential in every council area in the state. What differs between councils is which uses their Land Use Table permits in R3, and the objectives the table opens with.

How the Land Use Table reads

Each zone gets four items in the table, in the same order every time. The fourth is where most misreadings happen.

• Item 1Objectives of zone

  Not a list of uses. The consent authority must have regard to these when deciding an application, and they are what a marginal proposal is argued against.

• Item 2Permitted without consent

  Usually infrastructure and, in rural zones, farming. No development application at all.

• Item 3Permitted with consent

  The list that matters. If your use is not named here — or caught by a group term defined in the Dictionary that covers it — you cannot lodge for it.

• Item 4Prohibited

  Either an explicit list, or the single word “Any development not specified in item 2 or 3”. Which of those two forms a zone uses changes everything about how the table reads.

The two forms item 4 can take are not stylistic. Where a zone lists its prohibitions explicitly, a use named nowhere in the table is permitted with consent by default. Where item 4 reads “any development not specified in item 2 or 3”, the opposite holds and an unnamed use is prohibited outright. Read item 4 before you read item 3.

Group terms: the use that is permitted without being named

The Standard Instrument Dictionary defines uses in a hierarchy. Some definitions are group terms that contain others — “residential accommodation” covers dwelling houses, dual occupancies, multi dwelling housing, residential flat buildings and more; “food and drink premises” covers restaurants, cafés, take away food premises and pubs.

If the Land Use Table permits the group term, every use inside it is permitted, even though none of them appears in the table. If the table permits only one member of a group, the others are not permitted by association. So the question is never “is my use in the table” but “is my use, or a group term that contains it, in the table” — and that is answered from the Dictionary, not from the zone.

The Standard Instrument zones

The full set, with the codes as they appear on a Land Zoning Map. The employment zones reform commenced on 26 April 2023 and replaced the B and IN families in Standard Instrument LEPs with E1–E5, MU1, W4 and SP4, so the retired codes are listed only as a glossary for older material.

When the zone permits it and no development application is needed

Some development in residential zones can be approved as complying development under the Codes SEPP instead of through a development application — assessed against fixed numeric standards by a council or a registered certifier. The Housing Code covers dwelling houses and attached development, and it applies only in zones R1, R2, R3, R4, RU5. Large lot residential (R5) and the rural zones (RU1, RU2, RU3, RU4 and RU6) are under the separate Rural Housing Code. Land Axis models a new dwelling house under it from the Department’s Guide to Complying Development (August 2023), not from the instrument text: an R5 lot, or an RU1, RU2, RU4 or RU6 lot of at least 4,000 m², gets an indicative Rural Housing Code envelope. An RU3 lot, or a smaller RU lot, is not modelled, and neither are alterations, outbuildings or the code’s private open space, parking and design standards, which have to be checked against Part 3A directly.

Being in one of those zones is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. Two other things have to hold. The development must be permissible with consent under the LEP applying to the land, which takes you back to the Land Use Table. And the land must not be caught by the exclusions, which switch complying development off entirely — among them land in a heritage conservation area or a draft one, land identified on an Acid Sulfate Soils Map as Class 1 or 2, land reserved for a public purpose, foreshore land, significantly contaminated land, and land in a drinking water catchment.

Where the pathway is available, the numbers it applies are the same everywhere: a maximum building height of 8.5 m, a gross floor area cap that steps with lot area, a minimum landscaped area, and setbacks keyed to lot size and width. Those tables are set out on the minimum lot size page, because lot area is what drives all of them.

Zone list mirrors the Standard Instrument codes used on NSW Land Zoning Maps. Transcribed from the Codes SEPP, current version for 8 July 2026, read 9 September 2026 (zone applicability checked against the NSW Planning Portal Housing Code page on 29 September 2026).

Sources

• Standard Instrument — Principal Local Environmental Plan, clause 2.3 and the Land Use Table
• State Environmental Planning Policy (Exempt and Complying Development Codes) 2008 — Part 3 Housing Code, and the clause 1.19 land exclusionschecked 2026-09-09
• Standard Instrument Dictionary — land use definitions and the group terms that contain them

Related: the three standards that decide how big a permissible use can be are height of buildings, floor space ratio and minimum lot size.