Whitehall has just priced one day of a planning examiner's work at £993.

Start with the instrument, because it is four days old and almost nobody has read it. The Strategic Planning (Costs of Public Examinations) (Standard Daily Amount) (England) Regulations 2026 were made on 4 November 2026 under section 303A(5) of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, laid before Parliament the next day, and come into force on 26 November 2026. Regulation 2 is the whole of it: the standard daily amount for a specified examination is £993, and "a proportion of that amount" applies to part of a day. A specified examination is a public examination under section 12I or section 12P(6)(a) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 — the sections inserted by section 58 of the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 to govern the new spatial development strategies.

Now the part that closes one door. Under new section 12I, the examiner of a spatial development strategy is "a person appointed by the Secretary of State". A reader with £373.25 does not become one of those by wanting to. So the £993 is not an invitation; it is a price signal — the first time the state has published, in a statutory instrument, what it believes one day of examining a planning document is worth.

And here is the door that was never shut. A neighbourhood plan has to be examined too, and the appointment rules are entirely different. Paragraph 7(4) of Schedule 4B to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 lets the local planning authority appoint the examiner, with the consent of the parish or forum that wrote the plan. Paragraph 7(6) states the only two conditions: the person must, "in the opinion of the person making the appointment", have appropriate qualifications and experience; and must be independent of the authority and the qualifying body, with no interest in land that may be affected. There is no register to join, no examination to sit, no statutory body to be a member of, and no fee to pay anybody. The qualification condition is a council officer's opinion, written down.

The money for it is already appropriated, and that is the mechanism most readers miss. MHCLG's neighbourhood planning grant for local planning authorities pays a council £20,000 for each plan when it issues the decision statement sending that plan to referendum, plus £5,000 for each of its first five neighbourhood area designations and £10,000 for a modification examined without a new referendum. It is paid under section 31 of the Local Government Act 2003, claimed through DELTA, and certified by the chief executive or the section 151 officer. A council appointing an examiner is therefore not spending its own money. It is spending a specific, labelled transfer that arrives whether the examination costs £3,750 or £7,500.

Against that £20,000, here is what the work is sold for. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, which runs the Neighbourhood Planning Independent Examiner Referral Service, publishes the rate: the examiner charges £750 plus VAT a day for an examination and £375 plus VAT a day for a pre-submission health check, plus reasonable expenses. RICS states that a typical written-representations examination takes about four to six days of examiner time and one with a public hearing about nine to eleven. Five days is £3,750 — 18.75% of the grant the council received for that plan. Ten days with a hearing is £7,500, or 37.5%. And NPIERS "makes no charge for you to apply".

The people doing it are findable and named. Andrew Ashcroft — BA (Hons), MA, DMS, MRTPI — examined the Misterton Neighbourhood Plan review for Bassetlaw District Council, appointed in October 2023 with Misterton Parish Council's consent and reporting on 8 January 2024 by written representations, with no hearing; he is a director of Andrew Ashcroft Planning Limited, company 09852915, incorporated 2 November 2015 in Hereford, two directors, accounts last made up to 30 November 2025. Intelligent Plans and Examinations (IPE) Limited, company 10100118, incorporated 4 April 2016 in Bath, three directors — Lee Armitage, Keith Errol Bertie Holland and Christopher Snarr — publishes its own price list: neighbourhood plan examination at a fixed fee from £4,875 plus VAT without a hearing and £7,500 with one, or £750 plus VAT a day; local plan and CIL examination work at £895 plus VAT a day. Both companies file micro-entity accounts, which is the tell: this is a profession of one- and three-person firms, not of institutions.

So the arithmetic. $500 is £373.25 and $5,000 a month is £3,732.46, or £44,789.49 a year, at HMRC's November 2026 rate. At the state's new £993 the gross target is 45.11 days of work a year. At the open-market £750 it is 59.72 days — about twelve five-day written-representations examinations. Being operational costs £152: £100 to incorporate online and £52 for the ICO data protection fee, 40.72% of the stake, with nothing payable to any planning regulator at all. That is the whole capital story, and it is the smallest entry cost this series has published for the United Kingdom.

What it is not is free money, and the honest limit sits in the tax. Fifty billed days at £750, the base case, is £37,500 of fees; after a 15% cost ratio, income tax and Class 4 National Insurance at 2026–27 rates that nets £26,855.70, or £2,237.97 a month — $2,997.99. To net $5,000 a month a sole trader needs £57,720.84 of profit, £67,906.88 of fees and 90.54 billed days at £750, which is about eighteen examinations a year. The scarce thing on this route is not a licence and not capital. It is the first council willing to put your name on a decision.