Almost everyone who has been unfairly refused asks the same question: if I win my appeal, will the council have to pay me back? The honest answer is usually no. Winning your appeal does not, by itself, get you your costs. Costs are awarded for a council behaving unacceptably badly, not simply for being wrong.
An inspector can order a council to pay your costs, but only where it has behaved unreasonably and put you to unnecessary expense — missing deadlines, failing to turn up to the site visit or defending a refusal that has no sound planning basis. Awards are uncommon, and the general rule is that each side pays its own way. The simple fact is that winning an appeal is not enough on its own to justify a costs award.
Won the appeal, but no costs: Windsor and Maidenhead
We recently won an appeal in Windsor and Maidenhead for a converted outbuilding the council had wrongly treated as a separate house. The appeal was allowed. But when we applied for costs, the inspector refused them — because, although the council was wrong, it had a genuine case to answer and had not behaved unreasonably in refusing. That is the system working exactly as intended: you can be right, and win, and still not recover a penny.
When the council does have to pay
Contrast that with a case in Bromley, where the council refused a modest extension as “overdevelopment” with nothing to back it up, and against the advice of its own officers. The inspector allowed the appeal and ordered the council to pay the applicant’s costs, because the refusal was vague, unsupported and unreasonable.
Or take Station Road in Hampton, where Richmond lost five appeals on one street and was ordered to pay costs twice — once for ignoring its own earlier decision on the same building, and once for springing a policy argument at appeal that its own officer’s report had called “passable”. In each case it was not the loss that triggered the costs award, but the unreasonable behaviour behind it.
What you can recover, and what you can’t
A costs award covers the direct cost of the appeal itself — in most of our cases, that is our fee. It does not cover the money you lost through delay, the value of the time you spent or the fee you paid for the original planning application. It puts you back to where you would have been if the council had got it right, and no further.
Should you even ask?
Not always – applying for costs can actually backfire on you. Case officers often put little effort into defending an appeal, which can be a big help. Under the new 2026 procedures, they won’t even be invited to prepare an appeal statement.
However, if you apply for costs, the council will be given an opportunity to defend itself and the case officer will work hard to do so. That gives the council an extra opportunity to explain that their behaviour and final decision was reasonable and justified. For most people the prize is the planning permission, not the costs, and it is rarely worth risking the first for the second.
Since the April 2026 changes, the fast-track Part 1 appeal system still allows you to apply for costs, and we handle the application as part of the appeal. When we take on your case we will tell you honestly whether we think costs are likely to be awarded, and whether it is worth asking at all. If you are curious about your own case, just ask us.
We run planning appeals on a fixed fee of £399, and we win more than half of the appeals we take on. Send us your decision notice and we will review it free of charge. Get in touch — we respond within one working day.