Short list. Reading it before you order is the difference between a Saturday job and an eight week wait.
| Surface | Limit | Covered |
|---|---|---|
| Roof, pitched | 200 mm | Yes, kept below the ridge |
| Roof, flat | 600 mm | Yes, measured up from the roof |
| Wall on to a highway | 200 mm | Yes, outside conservation areas |
| Wall, anywhere else | 400 mm | Yes |
| Wood, cladding, balcony | n/a | No, and the exclusion names plug-in solar |
| Highway-facing wall in a conservation area or World Heritage Site | n/a | No |
| Grounds of a listed building, scheduled monument | n/a | No |
Planning Portal guidance for solar equipment on a house, a block of flats or a building within the curtilage, read 13 September 2026. A listed building needs planning permission and listed building consent together.
Put the planning conditions and the numbers side by side and they point the same way, which does not happen often.
The conditions refuse to cover a wooden wall, a balcony or timber cladding. The index says a garden frame performs within about one per cent of a perfect roof. So the arrangement that scores highest on our own chart is also the one that raises no question with the council.
Meanwhile the arrangement the market advertises hardest is the one the conditions leave out. Almost every listing for these devices calls them balcony kits.
Falling outside permitted development does not make the device unlawful. It removes the shortcut, turning a job you could do this weekend into an application with a timescale and possibly a fee attached.
A transitional year applies, during which the conditions as they stood before the change may be relied on instead of the rewritten ones. Two contradictory answers about a timber surface are therefore both currently defensible.
If anybody is advising you on one, ask which set they are working to and what becomes of the installation when the older set lapses.
We hold the guidance but not the amending order behind it. Until we do, this page reports guidance and attributes it as guidance rather than quoting statute at you.