Sligo planning permission: how often it is granted, and how long it takes

How Sligo compares with the other councils

Sligo ranks 11th of 30 councils on the share of applications granted, with 92%, close to the 90% of the median council. A typical decision comes faster than at the median council: 53 days against 55. Few files drag on: nine in ten decisions came within 166 days, against 209 days at the median council.

Requests for further information are less frequent here: the register records one on 29% of all the decisions it records, against 39% for the median council, and decisions are no slower than the median. For the 28 decisions flagged as one-off houses, the share granted (89%) is close to the council's overall figure.

Applications are up. Sligo received 573 in 2025, 31% more than the 438 of 2019. 2025 was the busiest full year in the register since 2019.

What Sligo reported for 2025

Sligo's return gives civil engineering more room than most: 33 applications, the second-highest count after Wexford, while 16 of the 30 councils in the returns left that line at zero or blank. Other functional categories add 70, next to 260 dwellings and 22 farm buildings. Commercial premises are few (5) and no government, health or education building appears. Refusals were rare, 19, almost all for houses (18). Invalid applications numbered 93. Its other functional count is the fifth-highest in the returns. Social-use buildings (16) and industrial sites (6) are small groups, and 319 applications were decided within 8 weeks. Only 2 councils, Sligo among them, list no government, health or education building at all. Sligo's busiest years are recent: 573 applications in 2025 and 541 in 2024, above any earlier year in the series. Every refusal in the return concerned a house or commercial premises.

These figures come from each council's annual return to the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage: applications received in 2025, decisions to refuse and other measures, published under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. An application that fits several categories is counted in each, so the categories do not add up to a number of applications, and the Department notes that councils may have read its guidance in slightly different ways.

Following an application in Sligo

In the national register, Sligo applications link to their files on eplanning.ie/SligoCC.