What Is a "Public Register Floor Plan"?

The short version

When you lodge a DA in the ACT, most of your plans end up on the ACT Planning public register — a website anyone can search, and look at, forever, even after your granny flat is built. That's a normal part of the process and it's required for transparency.

The problem: your regular floor plan shows everything — where your bedroom is, where your bathroom is, how your kitchen is laid out, every internal wall. You probably don't want random strangers on the internet being able to see the exact internal layout of your home.

So the fix is simple. You make a second copy of the same floor plan, but you delete all the internal walls from it. What's left is just the outer shape of the building — its footprint and overall dimensions — with none of the room-by-room detail inside. That stripped-down version is the one that goes on the public register.

Your real, detailed floor plan (with every room shown) is still submitted and still gets assessed by the Territory Planning Authority — it's just not the version the public gets to see. Same building, same outer dimensions, two versions of the drawing: one full-detail copy for the assessors, one outline-only copy for public view.