Abstract: In the last few years there has been intense interest in the performance of Australia's planning systems. Partly driven by concerns about housing supply and affordability, and in part by a wider regulatory reform agenda, there have been major challenges to the legitimacy of policy settings for land supply, environmental assessment and infrastructure charging (eg. RDC 2007; COAG Reform Council 2010). However, to date the evidence base on planning system performance is limited and largely dominated by sectoral interests. Indicators of performance are often simplistic – focusing on the quantity and speed of decisions – which in many cases misconstrue the wider social and environmental purposes of planning systems. In this context, this paper presents early findings from a larger study (Gurran, Phibbs et al. 2011) which aims to establish a more comprehensive framework for measuring planning performance in relation to housing supply and affordability outcomes and more widely. The first section of the paper reviews the international literature on planning system performance measurement and relationships between planning and the housing market, as a particular subset of plan outcome evaluation. Drawing on this literature, it conceptualises different approaches to measuring relationships between planning and housing outcomes in relation to indicators of planning system policy orientation, regulatory constraint, service efficiency, and local authority ‘culture’. The paper then charts existing and emerging approaches to measuring planning system performance and housing market efficiency in Australia, comparing these approaches the more established practice of national reporting on planning and housing market outcomes in the United Kingdom (UK), and situating existing indicators in relation to the typology of measures identified through the international literature.