Guide
Who holds your flood planning level
It is the single number most likely to change what your house costs, and there is no one place to look it up. In most states you can read the mapping. In New South Wales, for most addresses, you cannot.
A flood planning level is the height a habitable floor has to reach on land a council has mapped as flood affected — a height above a datum, not a depth of water.
Everything follows from it: the steps to the front door, whether a garage sits at natural ground level, how much fill a flat block needs or how deep a cut goes on a sloping one, and whether a single-storey design still works. It is settled before a builder can price the slab honestly, and it is not something a quote can carry as an allowance.
Every state publishes this differently
This is the part nobody tells you, and it is why advice written for one state misleads in another.
South Australia maps flood hazard in bands through the Planning and Design Code, with a separate overlay for coastal inundation. Victoria splits it in two — a Land Subject to Inundation Overlay for a waterway leaving its channel, a Special Building Overlay for stormwater running overland — and a block can be in one, both or neither. Tasmania runs a Flood-prone Hazard Areas Code alongside coastal inundation and erosion codes.
In each of those the mapping can be read: you can find out whether a hazard layer touches an address before you make an offer.
New South Wales is the exception
New South Wales asks each council to prepare a flood planning map, and the level lives in that council's own instrument. There is a statewide Flood Planning Map layer on the NSW planning portal, and councils can lodge theirs to it.
On 22 September 2026 that layer held 622 mapped features — and only 84 of them came from a council. Those 84 belong to ten councils:
Bathurst Regional · Clarence Valley · Forbes · Hornsby · Mid-Western Regional · Tamworth Regional · Wentworth · Wingecarribee · Wollongong · Yass Valley
The other 538 features are not council maps at all. They come from two state planning policies covering the Western Sydney growth precincts — the Central River City and Western Parkland City precinct SEPPs — which is why they carry no council name. Strip those out and the picture is starker than the headline count suggests: outside ten council areas and two state precincts, there is no flood planning level on the state portal at all.
Read from the NSW Planning Portal Flood Planning Map layer on 22 September 2026: 622 features total, 84 attributed to ten named local government areas, 538 to the two precinct SEPPs. Counting the unattributed group as a council is why this figure is sometimes quoted as eleven councils.
What that means if you are buying in New South Wales
If your address is not in one of those ten council areas, no public map will give you the number. It exists — your council holds it — but nothing you can read publishes it, and anyone quoting one without naming the council document it came from is guessing. So you ask: it is free, it takes one email, and it is the highest-value question you can put to a council before committing to a site.
What to ask for
"What is the flood planning level for this address, and what minimum habitable floor level would apply to a new dwelling?" Give the full address and the lot and DP number, and ask for the answer in writing.
Two follow-ups worth adding to the same email. Is any part of the lot mapped as a floodway or high-hazard area? A floodway carries moving water and is more tightly controlled than land that simply goes under. What does the council require of fill, and of the area under the floor? Raising a floor is rarely just a taller slab — fill has to be engineered and can need its own approval, and the space underneath may have limits on enclosure and use.
When to ask
Before you buy, not before you build. The answer can change what a block is worth, and a contract of sale signed before the level is known is a contract signed on an unknown number.
Why this site does not print a figure
Every suburb page here names which hazard layers we have read and which we have not. For New South Wales flood, we have not — because for most addresses there is nothing to read. A page that quietly omits the question is not being more helpful than one that names the gap.