Councils spent £45m over the past three years on external legal advice relating to planning appeals, according to Freedom of Information (FOI) Act requests.
Each local authority spent an average of £45,000 per year on legal advice between 2020-21 and 2022-23.
The Home Builders Federation, which sent the FOI requests, calculated this amounted to a national spend of £15m a year on external advice.
Over the three-year period surveyed, the top 10 councils alone spent £5m, with Medway Council spending the most with a total of £680,000.
The Planning Inspectorate, an executive agency of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, spent £5m on external legal advice relating to planning appeals during the same period.