The 10.7 Certificate: The Two-Page Document That Decides What Your Land Is Worth

There's a document in the back of your contract that tells you, in about two pages of unadorned council prose, most of what a developer would pay a consultant to work out about your land. You already own a copy. You almost certainly haven't read it since the day you bought.

It's the section 10.7 planning certificate. Your solicitor called it the 10.7, an older solicitor may still call it a 149 — the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act was renumbered on 1 March 2018 and section 149 became section 10.7, which is why half the council websites in the state still carry both names. Nothing about the document changed. Just the number.

I bring it up because of a pattern. Owners come to us with a question about development potential and a strong prior belief about the answer, and the belief nearly always traces back to something a neighbour said. Meanwhile the actual answer, or a very large part of it, is sitting in a PDF on their own hard drive. Not the whole answer. But the constraints that would have killed the project are on that page, and they're on it in plain language.

What it is, legally

Councils issue planning certificates under section 10.7 of the EP&A Act 1979. The contents aren't left to the council's judgement: Schedule 2 of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Regulation 2021 prescribes a couple of dozen matters that every certificate must address, and the council has to address all of them whether or not any apply to your parcel. That's why so much of the document reads "not applicable" — the blanks are the point, and a blank is information.

Two versions exist and the distinction matters more than most people realise.

A 10.7(2) certificate is the prescribed one. Zoning and what's permissible in it, the environmental planning instruments and development control plans that apply, whether complying development can be carried out, contributions plans, bushfire prone land, flood related development controls, land contamination matters, mine subsidence, road widening and road realignment, heritage, biodiversity values land, coastal management. Since 1 October 2022 it also has to disclose draft instruments and draft DCPs that have been publicly exhibited, which is the single most useful addition to the certificate in a decade — a draft LEP amendment that changes your floor space ratio is a material fact about your land, and it now has to be on the page.

A 10.7(5) certificate is different in kind. It's discretionary. The council may add advice on other matters affecting the land that it happens to hold and that Schedule 2 doesn't cover. Councils vary enormously in how much they put in one, and some charge extra for it. This is where you sometimes find outstanding orders, notices, unapproved building work the council knows about, or a flood level for the specific lot rather than the general statement that flood controls apply.

Buy the 10.7(2) and the 10.7(5) together. The marginal cost is small and the 10.7(5) is where the surprises live. If a council's 10.7(5) comes back thin, that's worth knowing too.

One more thing worth knowing if you're selling rather than buying. A current 10.7(2) is a prescribed document under the Conveyancing (Sale of Land) Regulation 2022 and has to be attached to the contract for residential land. Leave it off and the purchaser may have a right to rescind, which is not a discovery anyone wants to make at exchange.

Reading it for development potential

Most people read the certificate as a hazard list. Read it as an entitlement document instead and the order of importance inverts.

The zone and the permissibility list are the first thing and they aren't the last word. The certificate names your zone and the instrument that applies. What it typically won't do is spell out the height limit, the floor space ratio or the minimum lot size for your lot — those sit in the LEP maps, and you have to go and look. It's also worth remembering that the certificate reflects the instruments as they stand, and the housing reforms have layered state policy over local controls in a way that a zone name alone no longer describes. An R2 lot is not what an R2 lot was three years ago, which is the whole argument of the piece on what R2 zoning means after the 2025 changes.

Complying development. The certificate states whether complying development may be carried out on the land and, if not, why. This is a fast read on your approval pathway and therefore on your programme and holding cost. If it's ruled out, the reason is normally one of the overlays further down the page, and knowing which one tells you whether the site sits in DA territory for a technical reason that can be designed around or a structural one that can't.

Heritage. The certificate distinguishes an item from a conservation area, and so should you, because they behave completely differently under the housing reforms. Items are excluded from the mid-rise policy. Conservation areas are not, which surprises nearly everyone and is the substance of the piece on developing inside a heritage conservation area.

Flood and bushfire. These read as binary on the page and aren't in practice. Bushfire prone land is mapped in vegetation categories with buffers, and which category you're in determines both your construction standard and whether the state housing policies apply to you at all. Flood related development controls mean the council has controls, not that your particular lot is affected at a level that changes your yield — the flood planning level for the lot is the number you actually need, and it's a 10.7(5) question or a separate flood certificate.

Contamination. The wording here is careful and easy to skim past. It usually says the council has not been notified of anything, which is not the same as the land being clean. Former service stations, orchards, market gardens, dry cleaners and filled land are the usual suspects, and a preliminary site investigation is what settles it.

Biodiversity values land. If the parcel is on the Biodiversity Values Map, you're in the offsets scheme automatically the moment you clear native vegetation, regardless of area. That's a cost line that has ended more subdivisions than any other single overlay in this state, and it's covered in detail in the piece on the biodiversity offsets scheme.

The three things it won't tell you

The certificate is a statement about planning controls. It is not a statement about your land, and the gap between those two is where owners get hurt.

It says nothing about what's on your title. Easements, rights of carriageway, restrictions on use, covenants limiting you to a single dwelling or a particular roof material — none of that appears on a 10.7. It lives on the title search and the deposited plan, and a drainage easement running through the middle of the site will reshape a scheme far more decisively than most of the overlays that are on the certificate.

It says nothing about services. Whether the sewer main crosses your lot, whether the water main in the street has capacity, whether the substation has spare load for another twelve dwellings. Sewer diagrams come from the water authority and the capacity questions come from the network operator, and on a mid-rise site those answers can be worth more than the zoning is.

And it doesn't tell you whether a project stacks up. The certificate establishes what is permissible. Permissible and profitable are unrelated categories, and the arithmetic that connects them is the feasibility, which needs an end value and a build cost, neither of which any council document contains.

A practical order of operations

Order the 10.7(2) and the 10.7(5) from your council, usually online, usually a modest fee and a few days. While you wait, pull the parcel up on the NSW Planning Portal spatial viewer and step through the layers — zoning, height, floor space ratio, minimum lot size, heritage, bushfire, flood, biodiversity values. The viewer gives you the numbers the certificate leaves out; the certificate gives you the disclosures and the drafts the viewer doesn't carry. They're complements, and neither alone is enough.

Then order the title search and the deposited plan. Then, and only then, is it worth anyone's time to sketch a yield.

Total cost of the above, if you do it yourself, is under a couple of hundred dollars and an afternoon. I've seen owners spend five figures on concept drawings for a scheme that a $60 certificate would have ruled out in the first paragraph, and I've seen owners accept an offer well under what the land was worth because nobody had told them the draft instrument on page two had already doubled their entitlement.

PropertyThrive does this read for owners at no cost — certificate, spatial layers, title, and a plain answer about what the land can carry and what a developer would pay for it. Book a free assessment and you'll have it back within 24 hours.