£349 plus the council fee. £349 refunded if the council refuses.

Every route below includes the same statutory council fee, it's set nationally, not by the service provider. The gap is in the drafting fee. The table shows the £274 proposed-works fee; for a retrospective certificate add £274 to each total (the s.191 fee is £548).

• Pre-validation against every GPDO Part 1 clause, the same rules the council's planning officer will check. If your project can't win, we tell you before you pay.
• The completed application form and cover letter to the council, with the development described precisely: exact dimensions, materials, and room-by-room use. Imprecise description is the #1 self-inflicted refusal reason, so we don't do shorthand.
• Statement of Truth written to the structural standard Inspectors look for.
• Filing by email with your council's planning team, fee payment on your behalf, 8 week case monitoring.
• Checking the one document you supply: an OS-licensed site location plan with the property outlined in red, about £10 from an accredited supplier. We tell you exactly where to buy it and check it before we file.
• Any response to the council's case officer during the 8 weeks, see Chapter IV for the mechanism.
• Direct dashboard link to share with your conveyancer so they can track the application without pinging you.
• The £349 refund if the council refuses. (The council fee is paid to the council at submission and isn't recoverable. Filing also puts the work on the council's record, so indemnity insurance is normally no longer an option after a refusal.)

The fee is statutory, set nationally, not by the individual council. It is derived from what a full planning application for the same work would cost, so it depends on the project. For an extension or loft, a proposed-works certificate (s.192) is half the £548 householder application fee: £274 from 1 April 2026. For an outbuilding within the curtilage the underlying fee is £272, so the certificate is £136 proposed and £272 retrospective. For a retrospective certificate (s.191) it's the full planning fee: £548. Both are indexed to CPI every 1 April, and the figure shown at checkout is the one charged. Every council in England charges the same amount.

We pass it through at cost as a separate Stripe line item so refund mechanics are clean: if the council refuses, we refund our £349 service fee. The council fee is paid to the council at the time of filing, the council keeps it regardless of decision, so it's not recoverable from us. Nor can we give back the indemnity-insurance option, which a filed application normally ends. Both are spelled out on the payment step before you pay.

The council's case officer sometimes asks for a clarification during the 8 week window, "was this dormer in place before 2021?", "can you confirm the eaves to boundary distance?", "is the red line on the location plan the full curtilage?". That's part of the £349.

The mechanism is straightforward: we list LDC Express as the agent on the application form (you're the applicant). Councils route all correspondence to the agent by default, so these queries land with us rather than you. Because we file by email with the planning team, every acknowledgement and query arrives in our inbox.

When a clarification arrives, we draft the response within one working day using your original intake answers and site photos. If we need information we don't already have, we ask you via your dashboard. No extra fee, even if it takes three rounds to settle.

No per hour top-up. No "complexity" surcharge. No "Article 4 was actually in force" add-on, if Article 4 applies, we tell you at the intake stage and you don't pay.

If the council refuses because of a drafting error on our side (a missing document, a mis-cited clause, an imprecise description), we don't make you pay again. We re-draft and re-file at no additional service-fee charge, and we pay the fresh council fee ourselves. One re-file per case. Details in the Terms.

The only thing that ever increases your total is if you decide to apply for two genuinely different certificates on the same property (e.g. A rear extension on one application, a garden office on another). Each certificate carries its own £349 service fee and council fee because each is filed with the council as a separate application.