Sources and methodology

Planning controls and legislation

Zones, overlays and the standards a design is checked against are read from the planning schemes themselves, and every assessment is stamped with the amendments it was made under.

Victoria Planning Provisions and council planning schemes (Department of Transport and Planning)

Zones, overlays, particular provisions and schedules, cited by clause numberAs amendments are gazetted; zone and overlay maps refreshed weekly

NSW legislation — Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, Standard Instrument LEPs and SEPPs

Land use tables, height, floor space ratio, minimum lot size and the Housing SEPPAs instruments are made or amended; maps refreshed weekly

Victoria Government Gazette

Gazetted contribution rates and leviesAs published

Property and spatial data

The parcel, address, roads and the planning layers on the map are the states’ open data.

Vicmap — Department of Transport and Planning (Victoria)

Property, parcels, addresses, roads, planning zones and overlays, elevation, administrative boundaries, treesLoaded weekly to quarterly, by dataset

DataVic — Victorian Planning Authority; First Peoples – State Relations; Department of Transport and Planning

PSP precinct boundaries; Areas of Cultural Heritage Sensitivity; Designated Bushfire Prone Area; PPTN car parking areaMonthly to quarterly

NSW Spatial Services (Department of Customer Service)

Cadastre, addresses, roads, administrative boundaries, elevation and contoursWeekly to quarterly

NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure; NSW Rural Fire Service

Planning instrument maps, Planning Portal applications; bush fire prone landWeekly

Australian Bureau of Statistics

ASGS 2021 postal areas (NSW postcode layer)With each ASGS edition

Taxes, duties and statutory charges

Each charge names its publisher and the date its schedule was read, beside the figure it produced.

State Revenue Office Victoria

Land transfer duty, land tax, Windfall Gains Tax, Metropolitan Planning LevyChecked at each 1 July indexation and when rates change

Revenue NSW

Transfer duty and land taxChecked at each 1 July indexation

Councils, the VPA and the NSW Planning Portal

Development contributions plans, infrastructure contributions and application feesAs each plan or schedule is revised

Sydney Water, Hunter Water and NBN Co

Developer charges and new-development connection chargesAs published

Essential Services Commission (Victoria)

Average council rates and charges per assessment, for the holding-cost estimateAnnual local council outcomes report

Finance

Floating development debt is priced as a margin over the bank bill rate, read from the RBA rather than typed in.

Reserve Bank of Australia — Statistical Table F1

3-month bank accepted bills / NCDs (BBSW); BBSY is derived from it by market conventionPublished daily; read at most twice a day, and dated wherever it is shown

Construction costs and escalation

Construction rates are compared against published tender rates. Escalation series are shown side by side because the publishers disagree; each is an estimate, not a forecast of your project.

Rider Levett Bucknall — Riders Digest 2026

Building cost ranges per m² of gross floor area, by capital cityAnnual edition

Rider Levett Bucknall — Tender Price Index

Tender price escalation by city; used to bring construction benchmarks to todayQuarterly

Australian Bureau of Statistics — Producer Price Indexes (cat. 6427.0)

House, residential and non-residential building construction output and input pricesQuarterly

Cotality — Cordell Construction Cost Index; Altus Group; Turner & Townsend

Construction cost and price outlooksQuarterly to annual, by publisher

Land Axis benchmarks and defaults

Where no publisher covers a figure — professional fees, contingency, marketing, commission, and the realism of a massing scheme — Land Axis uses its own benchmarks. They are benchmarked against Land Axis’s database of completed feasibilities and council-approved schemes, and are shown as “Land Axis benchmark” with the number of projects behind them and the date they were measured.

Starting assumptions in the quick screening — fee and contingency percentages, loan-to-value, interest rate, finance fees and programme — are marked “Land Axis default — edit for your project”. They are starting points, not recommendations, and a published band is shown beside them where one exists.

Benchmarks raise warnings; they never change a figure. A number only changes when you change it.

Data licences

The state and Commonwealth data we use is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. These credits appear on the map, on exported site plans and reports, in the lender pack and on shared links.

Basemap and imagery © Mapbox © OpenStreetMap contributors.