Minimum lot size bands, and what the number governs

190 of the 958 Australian suburbs published on this site carry a mapped minimum lot size. That is a count of our own published pages, not of every suburb in the country — the corpus grows, and this page is rebuilt with it. All are in New South Wales, the only state in this dataset that publishes the control as spatial data. 24 distinct bands appear across them.

The control is routinely misread in both directions. It does not cap what may be built on a lot that already exists below the minimum — an undersized parcel is not thereby unbuildable, and its development potential comes from the instrument's written provisions. What it does govern is the creation of new lots, which makes it the control that decides whether a large garden is a future second block or just a large garden.

The more useful finding here is about variation. 96 of these 190 suburbs have more than one band mapped, so for half of them there is no suburb-level answer at all — the parcel sits in one band or another, and the bands are often far apart. Where that is the case an eyeballed block size will not tell you which applies: it is a map question, not a tape-measure question.