ACT’s Missing Middle: a city-wide upzoning

Canberra cut its share of highly restricted residential land by almost 20%

As a result of the Missing Middle reforms, Canberra’s highly restricted residential share fell 91.4% → 75.1% (-16.3 pp).

But this headline finding actually understates the impact of the reforms. The drop is mostly diven by height limit increases across a small slice of Canberra’s land. The broadest change within the Missing Middle reforms makes it legal to build more than one dwelling, including low-rise apartments, on almost every every suburban lot in Canberra. But this barely moves the headline metric, because the height limit remains two storeys across most of Canberra’s land. But it is still a substantial relaxation of the previous land use controls.

What changed, by zone

Zone	Residential land	Change	Effect
RZ1	83.3 km² (75.0%)	multiple dwellings including apartments permitted (was detached-only)	Stays low-rise but no longer detached-only
RZ2	13.5 km² (12.2%)	2→3 storeys	Crosses out of the ≤2-storey highly restricted band
RZ3	4.6 km² (4.1%)	2→4 storeys	Crosses out of the ≤2-storey highly restricted band
RZ4	2.2 km² (2.0%)	3→6 storeys	Already medium-density; taller only
RZ5	2.3 km² (2.1%)	6→7 storeys	Already medium-density; taller only

Extent & distribution

De-restricted land (RZ2/RZ3 → 3–4 storeys)

This is the −16.3 pp headline figure move. The broad changes to RZ2 and RZ3 zones saw a total of 18.1 km² (16.3% of residential land) across Canberra upzoned out of highly restricted classification, as maximum permitted heights increased from 2 storeys to either 3 (for RZ2) or 4 (for RZ3).

Height increases (RZ4/RZ5 → 6–7 storeys)

These zones already permitted densities of 3 storeys (for RZ4) or 6 storeys (for RZ5). That means these changes don’t move the highly restricted metric—but they do still offer meaningful transit-oriented development changes: 55.1% of RZ4 and RZ5 lots are within 800 m of a rapid-transit stop.

Missing-middle (RZ1, apartments/manor at 2 storeys)

Canberra’s lowest-density residential zone is also its most broadly applied. 83.3 km², around ¾ of all residential land, now permits multiple dwellings territory-wide—but only at two storeys.

Canberra’s Missing Middle reforms are a broad, jurisdiction-wide upzoning

The reform touches 109 of 111 (98%) of Canberra’s statistical suburbs. It is a territory-wide, broad upzoning, and does not constitute a targeted precinct upzoning, as it updates rules under existing zones, without changing where those zones are applied.

Not all upzonings are created equal

Readers may identify that this territory-wide upzoning was insufficient to move the headline highly restricted figure of the Zoning Atlas for all lots in the ACT.

That is because the highly-restricted metric is a union of several different planning controls, meaning that a reform that enables apartments on a given lot without increasing the maximum height permitted (i.e. RZ1 under the Missing Middle reforms) will not reduce the Atlas’s headline metric.

This is an important principle: not all upzonings are created equal. Land use controls often overlap, and their application is typically complex, due to the messy accretion of regulations over time. It is crucial to understand every aspect of a given planning control to understand the precise degree of permissiveness. ``