Yorkshire and The Humber
Land in Leeds
Figures for the Leeds council area (552 km²) from the open data behind our tools: registered land by size, planning constraints, farmland quality, the electricity network, brownfield sites, and land that may not be registered at all.
10,954
registered land outlines of an acre or more, 1,173 of them 20 acres or more.
Search them in the site finder →493
brownfield register sites, 863 hectares in all, with room for at least 35,928 homes by the council's estimate.
See them on the map →1,583
plots that may not be registered with HM Land Registry, on our sister site.
Unregistered land in Leeds →111
outlines that pass the site finder’s solar farm starting filters: 20 acres or more, near a substation, outside the main constraints and the best farmland.
Show them →Housing and the local plan
In the government’s Housing Delivery Test 2025, Leeds built 115% of the homes it needed over three years: no consequence.
The council delivered at least 95% of the homes it needed.
Its adopted local plan is the Leeds Local Plan: Core Strategy (as amended by the Core Strategy Selective Review 2019), adopted September 2019 (7 years ago; plans are meant to be reviewed at least every five years).
A new plan, the Leeds Local Plan 2022-2042, is at early consultation (Regulation 18).
From MHCLG’s Housing Delivery Test and the Planning Data platform’s local plan records, which some councils haven’t kept up to date. Whether the tilted balance applies to a scheme also depends on the council’s five-year land supply and the site itself: get planning advice.
Planning constraints
Of the 10,954 outlines of an acre or more, 4,949 (45%) are mostly in Green Belt. 871 (8%) are partly in flood zone 3, the highest risk.
From the government’s Planning Data platform. Check any site with Planning check.
Farmland quality
21% of the graded farmland outlines of an acre or more are grade 1 or 2, the best and most versatile land.
- Grade 21,214
- Grade 33,720
- Grade 4863
- Grade 558
- Non-agricultural258
- Urban4,841
Natural England’s provisional grades at the centre of each outline. A broad-scale map, so a field survey is needed for any one site.
Electricity network
4,582 outlines of an acre or more are within 1 km of a primary or grid substation. The network operator publishes spare demand capacity at 37 substations here, about 885 MW in all.
The best 2 km square for a data centre scores 100 out of 100, and 54 squares score 70 or more. Data centre site search →
Nearby council areas
Counts are of HM Land Registry INSPIRE title outlines (one title can have several outlines, and an outline isn’t always one field), counted under the council HM Land Registry files them with. Substations are from OpenStreetMap. None of this says whether land is for sale or could get planning permission. Sources: HM Land Registry; MHCLG Planning Data; Provisional Agricultural Land Classification © Natural England, Open Government Licence; the councils’ brownfield land registers; network operator open data; © OpenStreetMap contributors.