Standing reference · updated 7 September 2026
The low- and mid-rise housing reforms
Chapter 6 of the Housing SEPP. The most significant change to NSW residential planning controls in a generation, delivered in two stages, and still misunderstood by most of the people it affects.
The two stages
| Stage | Commenced | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| Stage 1 | 1 July 2024 | Dual occupancy permissible in Zone R2 Low Density Residential state-wide, overriding councils that had excluded it. Not dependent on being near a centre or station. |
| Stage 2 | 28 February 2025 | Terraces, manor houses, multi-dwelling housing, residential flat buildings and shop-top housing made permissible within LMR areas — walking distance of a mapped town centre or a listed station. |
The distinction between them is the thing to get right, and almost every summary written for a general audience blurs it.
Dual occupancy in R2 is state-wide. It does not require the site to be near anything. If your block is R2, a duplex is permissible on it, subject to meeting the standards.
Everything else needs the catchment. Terraces, manor houses, multi-dwelling housing, residential flat buildings and shop-top housing are only unlocked where the site sits inside an LMR area.
What "in an LMR area" actually means
Within 800 m walking distance of a mapped town centre, or of a station listed in Schedule 11 of the Housing SEPP.
Walking distance, not radial distance. The statutory test is the shortest safe pedestrian route via public footpaths and crossings, and that is always at least as long as the straight line on a map. In practice:
- Beyond 800 m straight-line, the site is out. The walk can only be longer.
- Inside roughly 550 m straight-line, the site is almost certainly in.
- Between about 550 m and 800 m, it is genuinely borderline and the actual route has to be measured. A river, a rail line or a missing footpath can put a site outside the catchment that looks comfortably inside it on a map.
Two things override all of this. A site in the LMR Exclusion Map is out regardless of distance. A site in a Transport Oriented Development area is also out of LMR — its uplift comes through Chapter 5 instead, on different terms.
Most LMR provisions apply only in zones R1 to R4.
Inner and outer bands
Within an LMR area, the catchment is split at 400 m. The inner band (0–400 m) carries more generous floor space ratio and height standards than the outer band (400–800 m). For a residential flat building or shop-top housing question the band is decisive — it changes the yield materially — so which side of that line a site falls on is worth establishing precisely rather than approximately.
Non-refusal standards
The reforms work partly through non-discretionary standards: a council cannot refuse a proposal on the ground that it fails to meet a lesser local control. Where the SEPP standard is more generous than the LEP or DCP figure, the SEPP standard applies. Where the local figure is more generous, the local figure still wins.
This is why some councils' controls now read as though they say one thing while the assessment applies another.
Who declares a class 2 design
Residential flat buildings are class 2, which puts their construction-stage designs inside the Design and Building Practitioners scheme. Concept and DA drawings are not regulated designs; the construction-issued ones are, and they are declared by a registered design practitioner. Terraces and multi-dwelling housing with ground-level access to each dwelling are class 1a and sit outside the scheme. Worth knowing before a scheme is costed, because it is an appointment, not a formality.
What this is worth knowing for
If you own an R2 block, a duplex is now on the table whatever your council's DCP says about it, and if the block can be subdivided afterwards the numbers change considerably. See dual occupancy.
If you own a block within walking distance of a centre or a station, the range of what's permissible may have widened well beyond a house. See multi-dwelling and LMR.
If you're buying, this is now part of due diligence. Two blocks a few hundred metres apart can have entirely different development potential, and the difference is not visible from the street.
This page describes Chapter 6 of the Housing SEPP as a general reference and is updated as the policy changes. Whether a particular site is in an LMR area depends on mapped data, the walked route, the exclusion layers and the in-force version of the SEPP — it needs checking site by site, and the Department's LMR Viewer is an indicative map rather than a determination.
Is your site in an LMR area?
Send us the address. We'll run the catchment test and tell you what it unlocks.