Consent likelihood checker: three answers, and none of them is a determination.
Pick your job and answer three questions about the property. The tool gives you a separate likelihood for a building consent, a resource consent, and whether the work is restricted building work — and it shows you the reasoning behind each, so you can take the right question to Council rather than the vague one.
Photography commissioned — plate reserved · July 2026
The checker
Work through your job.
How it works
What the tool is doing, and what it refuses to do.
It is a decision tree over published rules. It has no access to your property, and it never pretends otherwise — which is why one honest answer it can give you is “go and find out”.
The logic
- The job sets the baseline. Each of the fourteen job types carries a building-consent likelihood, a resource-consent likelihood and a restricted-building-work read, taken from the same table as the job-by-job page. The two are built from one shared list, so they cannot drift apart.
- An overlay escalates the resource consent answer. If a Special Character Area or a scheduled Historic Heritage place applies, external work becomes likely rather than possible.
- “I don’t know” about an overlay produces “ask Council”. Not a guess. If that fact is unknown, the resource consent question is genuinely unanswerable, and saying so is the useful output.
- External work brings the zone standards into play — height, height in relation to boundary, yards, building coverage, impervious area, outlook.
- A flood plain or overland flow path is its own constraint, and can affect floor levels and where you may build at all.
- The building consent answer is never softened by any of the above. Modifiers can only make an answer more cautious, never less. That asymmetry is the point.
What it will not do
- It will not say “no consent needed”. The most permissive thing it says is that an exemption may apply and is conditional.
- It will not print a threshold — a deck height, a fence height, a retaining wall height. Those are set in Schedule 1, they are amended, and people build to printed numbers. It tells you which condition decides the answer and where the current figure lives.
- It will not combine jobs for you. A bathroom that also moves a wall is two questions, and the more constrained answer governs.
- It will not replace the conversation with Council, and every result says so.
Questions people actually ask
Will this tell me definitely whether I need a consent?
No, and it is built so that it cannot. It outputs likelihoods against published rules — likely needs one, an exemption may apply and is conditional, or ask Council — and it finishes every result by telling you to confirm with Auckland Council. Only Council can determine what applies at your address, and a website that says otherwise is exposing you, not helping you. Start with Council.
Why does it ask about a character area before anything else?
Because that answer changes more Auckland renovation projects than any other single fact. A Special Character Area or a scheduled Historic Heritage place can require resource consent for demolition and for external alteration — the two things a renovation does. If you have not checked, the resource consent question genuinely cannot be answered, so the tool says so rather than guessing. Where the overlays bite.
Why do the exempt answers say “conditional” instead of “no”?
Because that is what Schedule 1 says. Almost every exemption in it applies only if the work stays inside stated limits, and several apply only if a Licensed Building Practitioner carries out or supervises the work or a Chartered Professional Engineer designs it. Meet the conditions and you are exempt. Miss one and the work needed a consent all along, whatever you believed. How Schedule 1 behaves.
Does the tool tell me the height limits for a deck or a retaining wall?
No, deliberately. Those thresholds are set in Schedule 1 and are amended, and a number printed on a third-party page is a number people build to years after it changed. The tool tells you which conditions decide the answer — height above the ground it sits on, whether anything loads the wall from above — and sends you to MBIE’s guidance and Auckland Council for the current figures.
My job is not in the list. What now?
Then ask Council rather than picking the nearest match. Renovation jobs combine: a bathroom that also moves a wall is two questions, and the more constrained answer governs. If you want a considered read on a specific job, send a brief and describe it.
Is my answer recorded anywhere?
No. The whole tool runs in your browser. There is no form submission, no email field, no analytics on the inputs, and nothing you select leaves the page.
What this tool is. A decision tree over published rules — Schedule 1 of the Building Act 2004 and the Auckland Unitary Plan. It is not a determination about your property, it is not legal advice, and it is not an approval. Only Auckland Council can tell you what applies at your address. Much renovation work is restricted building work and must be carried out or supervised by a Licensed Building Practitioner.