Kildare planning permission: how often it is granted, and how long it takes

How Kildare compares with the other councils

Refusals are more common in Kildare than in most councils. It ranks 29th of 30 on the share granted, 9 points below the median council (90%). The wait is longer than at the median council: 62 days against 55, so 7 days more for a typical decision. Nine in ten decisions came within 236 days, against 209 days at the median council.

Kildare asks for further information more often than most councils: the register records a request on 45% of all the decisions it records, against 39% for the median council, and its decisions also take longer than the median. One-off houses fare worse than other applications: 65% of the 188 decisions flagged as one-off houses were grants, 16 points below the council's overall share.

Applications are up. Kildare received 1,703 in 2025, 17% more than the 1,452 of 2019. The busiest full year was 2021, with 1,846 applications; 20 of the 31 councils peaked in that year.

What Kildare reported for 2025

Kildare's return uses only two of the 8 categories: 690 applications under dwellings and 381 under commercial buildings, with every other line at zero. The Department notes that some councils had difficulty getting figures for every category out of their systems; the return does not say why Kildare's other lines are empty. Its commercial count is the second-highest, after Dublin City, and its 72 refusals of commercial schemes are the most of any council. In all it reported 235 refusals, 163 on houses, and ruled 509 applications invalid, the third-highest number in the returns. House refusals, at 163, are the fifth-highest count after Meath, Limerick, Fingal and Dublin City. On speed, the council lists 576 applications decided within 8 weeks. In the register, only Fingal grants a smaller share of decisions than Kildare.

These figures come from each council's annual return to the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage: applications received in 2025, decisions to refuse and other measures, published under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. An application that fits several categories is counted in each, so the categories do not add up to a number of applications, and the Department notes that councils may have read its guidance in slightly different ways.

Following an application in Kildare

In the national register, Kildare applications link to their files on eplanning.ie/KildareCC.