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.
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.
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.
Flood planning maps exist for 10 of New South Wales' 128 councils. 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 — which 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.
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 the more useful of the two for one address. Our report names the studies that cover an address, the council area they were done for, who carried them out and when they were completed, so a buyer can ask the council for the study by name. That is an index of studies. It is not a statement about whether the property floods.
Check an address$9.90 including GST, paid once. Check the address first — the check is free and tells you which registers cover it before you pay anything.
A flood planning area is land below a council's flood planning level, subject to flood-related development controls. In New South Wales it is mapped by the local council and reported on a section 10.7(2) planning certificate.
It is a planning control rather than a flood risk assessment. It does not state flood depth or frequency, and it does not necessarily map overland flow, which is water travelling across the ground surface in heavy rainfall and is a common source of inundation on land outside any mapped flood area.
The flood planning clause is compulsory in New South Wales local environmental plans, but the mapping is not. As at September 2026, 10 of New South Wales' 128 local government areas publish a flood planning map.
Coverage figure derived from the NSW flood planning layer. © State of New South Wales (Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure), CC BY 4.0.
General information about New South Wales registers. Not legal, planning or valuation advice for any particular property.