What a flood planning area is

"Flood zone" is not a term NSW planning uses. The nearest register is the council's flood planning area, which says whether flood planning controls apply to the land, not how likely it is to flood. The council's flood enquiry is the authoritative answer.

A flood planning area is the land below a council's flood planning level. It is a planning control, not a flood risk model.

Where a council has mapped one, land inside it is subject to flood-related development controls: minimum floor levels, restrictions on certain uses, and requirements a development application must address. That is what the mapping is for.

What it does not tell you

It carries no depth and no frequency. Being inside a flood planning area does not tell you how often water arrives or how high it gets, and being outside one does not mean water never arrives. The line is drawn for a planning purpose, from a flood planning level: the level of a defined flood event, commonly the 1% AEP flood, plus a freeboard allowance. The detailed study behind it sits with the council.

Overland flow

A great deal of the water that gets into Australian houses never came from a river. It is overland flow: water running across the ground in heavy rain, following a path that has nothing to do with a mapped floodplain. Flood planning areas are usually drawn from mainstream flooding and often do not capture it, so land well outside every flood layer can take water this way. It is a question for the council's flood enquiry rather than for any map we can read.

How much of the state is mapped

In 115 of 128 New South Wales councils, fewer than one address in ten is on land that has any flood planning map at all in the NSW Planning Portal’s layers. Only 9 councils have a map for the land under nine in ten addresses or more, and 4 more for between one and nine in ten (our count, October 2026) © State of New South Wales (Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure), CC BY 4.0. For most addresses in the state, our report cannot report a flood planning area because the council has not published a map, and we say so rather than returning a negative. That is not the same as saying no flood control applies, because the flood planning clause is compulsory in every council's local environmental plan. Why that distinction decides the whole report.

Our flood planning map by council shows which New South Wales councils have a flood planning map in the Planning Portal's layers and which do not, and each of our New South Wales council pages with hazard figures says what its map covers.

For the other states, and for what to ask beyond a map, see how to check flood risk before buying.

In Queensland, the state publishes a broad-scale floodplain assessment overlay and, separately, an index of the flood studies that have been carried out. The overlay is a screening layer at drainage sub-basin resolution and is not meant for a single parcel; the index is more specific to one address, but we do not report it. Our report does not include the state's flood study index and does not name flood studies. For a Queensland address, ask the council whether it holds a flood study covering the land.

Reports from $9.90 including GST, paid once. The price belongs to the jurisdiction the address is in. The check is free: it tells you the exact total for your address, and which registers cover it, before you pay anything.