The general plan instead of the master plan: what changes for a plot owner
Since 31 August 2026 the master plan no longer applies. Where a municipality made the deadline, what your plot can become is set by the general plan, an act of local law carrying a planning zone and municipal urban standards.
General planPublished7 min read
The master plan bound the municipality; the general plan binds you too
The old master plan (studium) set directions. It bound the council when it adopted local zoning plans, but it decided nothing about any particular plot, an owner could not rely on it and an investor could not build an application on it.
The general plan is an act of local law. It covers the whole municipality and binds both new zoning plans and planning decisions. For the first time a single document says something about every plot in the municipality, including the ones no zoning plan ever reached.
Thirteen planning zones
The general plan splits the municipality into planning zones. The act defines thirteen of them: from the multifunctional zone that admits multi-family housing, through service, production and farming zones, to green space, water and open agricultural land.
A zone is not a land designation in the zoning-plan sense, and that is where the misreading usually starts. A plot in a multifunctional zone is not a plot you may put a block of flats on. It is a plot where that direction has not been ruled out up front, the zoning plan or a planning decision settles it.
Municipal urban standards
The second half of the general plan is the municipal urban standards: mandatory accessibility standards for social infrastructure and, where the municipality sets them, standards for the shape of new buildings. The first say how far a primary school and public green space may be from new housing. The second describe the parameters buildings in a given zone may take.
For a buyer this is the most concrete part of the document. The building standards turn into maximum height, intensity and the share of biologically active area that a zoning plan or planning decision will later repeat. Read them together with the zone, never on their own.
What if the municipality missed the deadline
The deadline for adopting general plans fell on 31 August 2026, and the old master plans expired with it. A municipality without a general plan has no directional document today: zoning plans in force and decisions already issued remain valid, but anything new rests on the facts on the ground and on separate legislation.
In practice that means a longer and less predictable route. Before buying in such a municipality, check how far the planning procedure has got, a draft general plan on public display tells you more about the area’s future than any other document you can get.
How to check this for one plot
All of this data is public. Municipalities publish the general plan digitally as GML, planning acts land in the Urban Planning Register, and GUGiK serves parcel boundaries and the orthophoto. The problem is that every source lives somewhere else and speaks its own language.
Zonio lines them up for the plot you pick: the planning zone from the general plan, the designation from the zoning plan where one is in force, and the environmental and infrastructure constraints, each stamped with the date we fetched it. Before you commit, it is still worth confirming the position with an official plan extract from the municipal office.