The Housing Choice and Transport Zone (Clause 32.10) is the most consequential new residential zone in Victoria in a decade: mandatory heights, no garden-area requirement, and a state-set promise of three to six storeys around train and tram activity centres. Amendment VC257 created it in February 2025, but created it empty. The zone only matters where the state actually maps it, and the mapping has arrived in waves, council by council, with little fanfare.
Because the zone lands via separate gazettals into separate planning schemes, nobody sees the whole picture at once. We can: we measured every HCTZ polygon in the state from the same live Vicmap layer our lookup engine queries. Here’s the full extent, as of 26 July 2026.
8,023 ha of HCTZ across 17 councils, and 2,626 ha of it was gazetted on 22 July, four days before this post.
The rollout, in four gazettals
| Gazetted | Wave | Councils | Hectares |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 Apr 2025 | Pilot centres (GC252 — 10 centres) | 12 | 2,132 |
| 31 Mar 2026 | Stage 1 (GC270 — 25 centres) | 9 | 3,242 |
| 21 May 2026 | Minor addition (Glen Eira) | 1 | 23 |
| 22 Jul 2026 | Stage 2 mapping begins (23 centres) | 6 | 2,626 |
The cadence is the story: roughly every four months, thousands of hectares change zone overnight. A conveyancer’s or valuer’s mental map of “what’s around Caulfield” that was right in June is wrong in July.
Where it actually is
Three councils hold 42% of all HCTZ land in the state:
| Council | HCTZ1 (ha) | HCTZ2 (ha) | Total (ha) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Glen Eira | 445 | 735 | 1,181 |
| Stonnington | 596 | 580 | 1,177 |
| Boroondara | 151 | 880 | 1,031 |
| Bayside | 220 | 472 | 692 |
| Darebin | 227 | 434 | 661 |
| Greater Dandenong | 221 | 334 | 555 |
| Moonee Valley | 0 | 473 | 473 |
| Merri-bek | 148 | 283 | 430 |
| …9 more councils | 1,823 |
The geography skews hard to Melbourne’s established east and south-east: the same municipalities where residential zone schedules have historically been most restrictive. Moonee Valley is the outlier pattern: 473 hectares, every one of them HCTZ2, not a single hectare of the taller designation.
Two designations, and the smaller one dominates
HCTZ heights are fixed by the zone itself, state-wide, unlike almost everything else in Victorian residential zoning, no council schedule can vary them:
- HCTZ1: 13.5 m / 4 storeys, rising to a mandatory-permitted 21.5 m / 6 storeys on sites ≥1,000 m² with ≥20 m frontage
- HCTZ2: 11 m / 3 storeys, rising to 13.5 m / 4 storeys on the same large-site test
The headline “six storeys near stations” belongs to HCTZ1, which is only 30% of the mapped area (2,438 ha). The other 70% (5,584 ha) is HCTZ2, whose standard case is three storeys. And the six-storey figure needs the large-site test: on an ordinary suburban lot under 1,000 m², HCTZ1 means 13.5 m. The zone is transformative, but the transformation is more granular than the headlines.
The wave almost nobody has noticed yet
The 22 July gazettal (the first Stage 2 mapping) added 2,626 ha across six councils, including two with no prior HCTZ land at all: Greater Dandenong (555 ha across the Springvale, Noble Park, Yarraman and Dandenong centres) and Whitehorse (228 ha). Glen Eira gained another 846 ha along the Caulfield–Elsternwick–Bentleigh corridor, taking it to the largest HCTZ estate in the state. Stage 2 covers 23 centres in total, so more mapping is still to come.
For anyone whose work touches these suburbs, the practical point: parcels that answered “GRZ2, 11 m discretionary” a fortnight ago now answer “HCTZ2, 11 m mandatory, no garden-area requirement, Built Form Overlay may apply”: a materially different development and valuation context, four days old.
Why we publish this
Every figure above is computed by a committed script from the live Vicmap planning-scheme layer, the same source our lookup engine queries per-site, and the wave dates were verified against the gazettals and the state’s activity-centres program record before publication. Zone extents change; this page states its as-of date, and we watch every Victorian scheme daily precisely because a third of this zone didn’t exist last week. Any address in these 17 councils can be screened through Feasibly against the current scheme, with the clause citation attached.
Method: all HCTZ polygons retrieved from Vicmap’s plan_zone layer (26 July 2026), areas computed in GDA2020/MGA55; figures are planar polygon areas of the zone mapping, not parcel counts or developable-land estimates. Heights are the mandatory values fixed by VPP Clause 32.10 (verified against the ordinance; they cannot be varied by schedule). Wave attribution from each polygon’s gazettal date, cross-checked against Amendment GC252 (11 Apr 2025), GC270 (31 Mar 2026) and the Stage 2 program record (22 Jul 2026). Screening data: verify with the relevant council before acting.