If you check a planning scheme once and file the answer, the answer has a shelf life. We can now say how short it is, because we watch every Victorian planning scheme every day and keep the detection record.
Over the 90 days to 5 August 2026, our monitor recorded 465 scheme movements across 81 Victorian councils.
465 detections · 81 councils · 237 of them state-wide · median detection lag 0 days
Two things in that number are worth separating, because they behave completely differently.
Most changes weren’t local
Of the 465 detections, 237 were state-wide — and they came from just three amendments: VC309, VC311 and VC312. A single VC amendment lands in every one of Victoria’s 79 planning schemes at once, so one gazettal produces 79 scheme movements.
The rest split into 200 council-specific changes and 28 group amendments (one instrument touching a defined set of councils).
The practical consequence: if you watch “your” council, you miss the majority of what changes. A conveyancer or buyers’ agent with a mental model of “Boroondara updates its scheme occasionally” is tracking the smaller half. The larger half arrives from the state and hits everywhere simultaneously — including the council you checked last week and considered settled.
The busiest councils, and why that list is less interesting than it looks
| Council | Detections (90 days) |
|---|---|
| Yarra | 11 |
| Monash | 11 |
| Kingston | 10 |
| Melbourne | 9 |
| Stonnington | 9 |
| Whitehorse | 9 |
| Bayside | 8 |
| Greater Bendigo | 8 |
| Ballarat | 7 |
| Latrobe | 7 |
Every council in the state appeared at least once — 81 of 79 planning schemes shows up because a couple of schemes carry more than one register entry. Inner-Melbourne councils cluster at the top, which is what you’d expect from the places doing the most rezoning work. But the floor matters more than the ceiling: there is no Victorian council whose scheme sat still for 90 days.
We see them the day they land
For each detection we record the gazettal date the register itself publishes, and the date we picked it up. Across all 465:
- median lag: 0 days
- 384 of 465 detected same-day or earlier than the register’s stated date
- p90: 1 day · maximum: 5 days
The “or earlier” needs an honest explanation rather than a boast: the register sometimes lists a gazettal date slightly ahead of when the entry actually appears, so our detection can precede the date printed against it. That is a quirk of how the register publishes, not evidence that we see amendments before they are gazetted. We don’t, and we won’t claim it.
What this data does not say
Three limits, stated plainly, because the interesting version of this post would overstate all three.
We know that a scheme moved, not what the amendment did. The record is the amendment number before and after — Ballarat going from C234ball to C266ball. Whether that changed a zone boundary, an overlay schedule or a piece of policy text is a separate question the register doesn’t answer in structured form. Anyone telling you what 465 amendments contained, from this data, is guessing.
The Victorian dominance here is ours, not Victoria’s. 463 of the 465 detections are Victorian, and exactly 2 are from New South Wales. That is not a fact about Australian planning; it is a fact about our instrumentation. Victoria publishes an amendment register we scrape daily, so we see it at amendment granularity. Other states are watched with coarser signals — LEP currency dates, statewide-instrument documents — which move far less often and tell us less when they do. Do not read this as “Victorian schemes change more than NSW schemes.” We can’t measure that yet, and neither can anyone else without the same instrumentation in both.
90 days is one season, not a rate. Amendment activity is lumpy — a single VC gazettal moves the total by 79 in one day. Three months is enough to show the shape; it is not enough to publish an annual rate, so we haven’t.
Why we publish the cadence at all
Because the shelf life of a planning answer is the part of this business nobody quotes. Every planning-data product, ours included, shows you a state of the world at a moment. The useful question is how fast that moment decays — and for Victorian planning schemes, the measured answer over this window is that something in the state’s schemes moved on most days, and three times it moved everywhere at once.
That is also why our amendment monitoring runs daily rather than on request, and why every value we return carries the date it was verified. The alternative — a number with no timestamp — is a number you cannot audit.
Method: detections recorded by the Feasibly planning-scheme monitor between 7 May and 5 August 2026, read from its own public detection history (/api/amendments) — the same feed behind our amendments page, so every figure here is checkable against it. Each number is produced by a committed, re-runnable script (scripts/content/amendment-digest-stats.mjs). Detection counts are movements observed, not amendments assessed. As at 5 August 2026.