Miss your appeal deadline and that is the end of it. There is no discretion, no grace period and no talking your way round it: if you are a day late, the Planning Inspectorate will not accept the appeal, and your only option is to start again with a fresh application. So the first thing to do with a refusal is find the deadline, and the second is not to leave it to the last minute. The tricky part is that the deadline depends on what kind of application was refused, and it is easy to assume you have longer than you do.
The householder deadline: 12 weeks
If the council refused an extension, a loft conversion or another alteration to your own house, you have 12 weeks from the date on the decision notice to lodge your appeal. That is the householder appeals deadline, and it is shorter than the deadline for most other appeals, which catches people out. The clock runs from the date printed on the decision, not the date you happened to read it, so check that date the moment the refusal arrives.
‘Householder’ means a house, not a flat
The 12-week householder deadline only applies to work on a single house. If you own a flat and you were refused permission to extend it, that is not a householder application, even though it feels like one. Extending a flat is treated as an ordinary planning application, and the appeal deadline is six months, not 12 weeks. The same goes for anything beyond a straightforward home improvement: a new dwelling, a change of use, a conversion. If in doubt, it is safest to assume you are on the shorter clock until you have confirmed otherwise.
Other appeals, other deadlines
The deadline changes again depending on what you are appealing.
Full and other planning applications (a new house, a flat conversion, a change of use): six months from the date on the decision notice.
Advertisement consent: just eight weeks, one of the tightest deadlines there is.
Listed building consent: six months.
Enforcement notices are different. You are not appealing a refusal but a notice telling you to undo something, and you must appeal before the date the notice takes effect, a date set out on the notice itself, and never less than 28 days after it was served. Miss it and the notice bites: you lose the right of appeal entirely and can be prosecuted for not complying. Enforcement appeals also run under a separate procedure, so if you have had a notice, treat it as urgent and take advice straight away. For enforcement appeals, contact Just Planning.
There is one more enforcement trap worth knowing. If you have been served an enforcement notice in the last couple of years and then get a refusal, your householder appeal window can shrink from 12 weeks to as little as 28 days. It is an unusual situation, but if it is yours, do not rely on the usual 12 weeks.
Non-determination is a different clock again
Everything above assumes the council has actually made a decision. If it has simply sat on your application past the statutory period, usually eight weeks for a smaller scheme, you do not have to wait forever. You can appeal against ‘non-determination’, the council’s failure to decide on time. That deadline is different again: you have six months from the date the council should have issued its decision. In practice, appealing non-determination is often a poor tactic, because you hand the decision to an inspector before you know what the council actually objects to, but the right is there if you need it.
Don’t waste the time you have
Under the appeal rules introduced in April 2026, most appeals are decided on the application documents plus a short written summary, with nothing added later. So the weeks between your refusal and your deadline are not spare time. They are the window in which to get your 250-word summary right and to make sure everything the inspector needs is already in the file. It is also the time to make the honest call between appealing and reapplying, which is not always an obvious choice.
Appeals are submitted online through the Planning Inspectorate, and there is no fee for a planning appeal. But the deadline is real, so the sooner you start, the more time you have to do it properly.
If you have been refused and are not sure how long you have or whether to appeal, send us your refusal for free initial advice. We’ll confirm your deadline, tell you honestly whether an appeal is worth pursuing, and if it is, we’ll prepare and manage it for a fixed fee of £399.