Auckland Council Technical Report

Housing Capacity Modelling Report: Housing Intensification and Resilience (Plan Change 120)

Subject to Partial Withdrawal and Including Proposed Amendments Notified in August 2026

Extract from the Executive summary

Executive Summary

This housing capacity assessment was undertaken for the purpose of assessing whether the Auckland Unitary Plan including Plan Change 120, following partial withdrawal and as proposed to be amended¹ meets the housing capacity requirement in clause 4(1)(a) of Schedule 3C of the Resource Management Act 1991.²  That is, a minimum housing capacity of 32.5% less than the housing capacity that would have been enabled if Plan Change 78 (as notified) were made operative. The minimum is equivalent to approximately 1.4 million dwellings of housing capacity.

This report presents the findings of the housing capacity assessment, and key technical details about methodology and approach to this model run.

The results of this housing assessment find that the Auckland Unitary Plan including Plan Change 120 (herein referred to as ‘PC120 as amended’ or simply ‘PC120A’ for short) provides for a total plan-enabled housing capacity of 1,701,286 dwellings. This is approximately 300,000 dwellings in surplus of the requirement set out in the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA).³

Sites are modelled against the base zoning provisions (without consideration of Precinct provisions ⁴) and a subset of key height and bulk affecting Controls and Overlays. The housing capacity modelling results presented in this report exclude capacity enabled within the City Centre Zone under Plan Change 78: Intensification (PC78). Clause 5(9) of Schedule 3C of the Resource Management Act 1991 prohibits the council from including housing capacity enabled in the City Centre Zone as at 6 June 2025 when calculating housing capacity under the Auckland Unitary Plan including Plan Change 120.

Consequently, City Centre housing capacity falls outside the scope of the statutory test required for this assessment, and has not been included in the modelling results reported here. Any assessment of additional capacity within the operative City Centre Zone relative to the notified City Centre Zone provisions will be undertaken separately when resources are available. This assessment does, however, incorporate the operative PC78 Metropolitan Centre Zone provisions, as publicly notified in March 2026.

This report and the Capacity for Growth Study model have assessed plan-enabled housing capacity only. Any broader aspects of development capacity, such as commercial feasibility, infrastructure readiness, and likely uptake, would be addressed as part of Auckland Council’s next Housing and Business Development Capacity Assessment (HBA).

Direct comparisons of outputs of this model run against previous model runs should be undertaken with care, especially on a site-by-site level. Changes to the cadastral pattern and development on sites since the last assessment and report for Plan Change 120 as notified means differences between the model runs may be the result of factors other than changes in zoning or planning provisions.⁵ For strategic or policy analysis, results are best interpreted at higher geographic scales. Aggregated outputs provide a more appropriate basis for understanding relative distributional patterns than site-level results. This is especially important given that not all plan provisions are able to or have been modelled, and given that each model run is responding to a static snapshot of Auckland’s form at a particular point in time.

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1. As publicly notified 27th August 2026.

2. Following amendment of Schedule 3C of the RMA in April 2026.

3. Derived from the ‘baseline’ assessment undertaken by Auckland Council (2025) – derived from ‘baseline PC78’ plan-enabled capacity of 2,073,946 dwellings, minus 32.5%. See section 1.1 on statutory context.

4. A qualitative assessment of the impact of Precincts relative to base zoning is being undertaken by others and will be made available in due course.

5. See section 4.8 for technical guidance on interpreting results.

Data outputs from the modelling are available for download below.

 Data files

Separate datasets for residential and business zone groups, with the residential datasets separated by groupings of Local Board areas for easier download.

These files contain sites processed under the CfGS model run for ‘AUP, including PC120 subject to partial withdrawal and proposed amendments’, as used to generate maps, tables, and graphs in the report above.

The Data Dictionary is included in each .zip file, and is available for separate download below if required.

• PC120_Amendment_Business_Capacity_Results.gdb

• PC120_Amendment_Residential_Capacity_Results_RN.gdb (Rodney)

• PC120_Amendment_Residential_Capacity_Results_RS.gdb (Franklin)

• PC120_Amendment_Residential_Capacity_Results_UC.gdb (urban central)

• PC120_Amendment_Residential_Capacity_Results_UN.gdb (urban north)

• PC120_Amendment_Residential_Capacity_Results_US.gdb (urban south)

• PC120_Amendment_Residential_Capacity_Results_UW.gdb (urban west)

Data Dictionary

Notes about the datasets:

• Latest version: PC120_Amendment ‘PC120A’ (as per Housing Capacity Modelling Report, November 2026)

• Spatial dataset: (zipped ESRI geodatabase v10.3 – GIS software required)

• Data Dictionary: for understanding data attributes – Excel spreadsheet

• Files have been zipped to reduce download size and maintain integrity of the folder directory.

• Data may be subject to revision without prior notice.

• The business dataset excludes the City Centre Zone.

Please contact us at research@aklc.govt.nz to discuss alternative file types.

Auckland Council, November 2026

See also

Auckland Council website

Plan change 120 PC 120: Housing intensification and Resilience

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2025 report

Housing capacity modelling report: Housing intensification and resilience (Plan Change 120) October 2025

Other related technical publications published on Knowledge Auckland.

The 2023 HBA, Housing and business development capacity assessment for the Auckland region 2023 includes background information on short- medium- and long-term capacity, infrastructure readiness and the regional growth projections and the business allocation model which form the basis of the current (PC78 informed) Auckland Growth Scenario v1.1. 

A fuller description of the base technology and approach to the Capacity for Growth Model for the Unitary Plan is outlined here: Capacity for growth study 2013 (Proposed Auckland Unitary Plan): methodology Part 1 and for the legacy Plans Capacity for growth study 2012: methodology and assumptions.