Victoria’s planning system hands every council the same set of residential zones, then lets each council rewrite the numbers through schedules. Everyone in the industry knows this in the abstract. But because the schedules live in 79 separate planning schemes, nobody sees the whole picture at once.
We can, because we’ve codified all of it, every residential-family zone schedule in the state, human-verified against the source schemes. Here’s what the full set shows, as of 25 July 2026.
792 schedules. 79 councils. 275 of them rewrite the state’s default rules.
One in three schedules rewrites a state default
Of 792 schedules, 275 (35%) set at least one control that differs from the Victorian Planning Provisions default. The two controls councils most often customise are the ones that decide project viability: minimum subdivision lot size (144 schedules set their own) and maximum building height (123 do).
So a “default rules apply” assumption fails on roughly every third schedule in the state. You can’t know which third from the zone code, only from the schedule.
The same zone code, wildly different rules
The spread inside a single zone family is the part that catches professionals out:
| Control (council-set values) | Lowest | Highest |
|---|---|---|
| NRZ minimum lot size | 300 m² (Monash, Greater Geelong) | 4,000 m² (Macedon Ranges NRZ7, Greater Geelong NRZ7) |
| LDRZ minimum lot size | 2,000 m² (Cardinia, Greater Geelong) | 50,000 m² (Greater Bendigo LDRZ5) |
| GRZ height limit | 9 m (five councils) | 41 m (Port Phillip GRZ4) |
| RGZ height limit | 10.5 m (Greater Geelong) | 40 m (Banyule RGZ4 — 12 storeys) |
| NRZ height limit | 8 m (Melbourne NRZ1) | 12 m (Brimbank NRZ2) |
Same zone family, thirteen times the land: 300 m² to subdivide in Monash. 4,000 m² in Macedon Ranges.
And the outliers have stories. The tallest “General Residential” height limit in Victoria (41 metres) belongs to a single site-specific schedule: the Esplanade Hotel site in St Kilda. Boroondara’s RGZ2 exists to set a 27-metre mandatory height for one address on Auburn Road. Schedules aren’t just local variation; some of them are legislation for a single parcel.
Fragmentation is itself unevenly distributed
Greater Bendigo and Stonnington each run 25 residential schedules. Buloke runs one. A practice working across metro Melbourne’s east deals with more schedule variation in three neighbouring councils than a practice covering half the Mallee sees in total, which is worth knowing before you assume your home council’s patterns travel.
Why we publish this
If your work touches land (conveyancing, valuation, acquisition, design), the schedule layer is the real rulebook, and these numbers are the proof that it can’t be guessed. The complete tables behind this analysis are published as reference pages: every council-set minimum lot size and every height limit, and every figure is queryable per-site through Feasibly, with the clause citation attached.
Method: computed from Feasibly’s codified bundle of all 79 Victorian councils’ residential-family zone schedules (NRZ, GRZ, RGZ, LDRZ, MUZ, TZ, RLZ and legacy R1Z/R2Z), each human-verified against the source planning scheme ordinance. “Council-set” means the value comes from the schedule itself rather than a state default. Data as at 25 July 2026; schemes amend continuously and we monitor that daily. Extremes verified against the source ordinance before publication. Screening data: verify with the relevant council before acting.