Most societies give you a coverage percentage. DHA Lahore does not. Its 2014 regulations (still the operative booklet, updated by policy letters) work the other way around: they tell you how much space to leave — front, rear and side 'clear spaces' measured including your boundary wall — and whatever remains is yours to build.
The numbers that matter
On a 5 marla plot (25 by 45 feet) you leave 5 feet in front, 3 at the rear and 3 on one side; the other side is a shared dead wall. That leaves a buildable footprint of roughly 814 square feet. The 5 marla exception everyone loves: the first floor can be 100% of the ground floor, where bigger plots are capped at 75%. So a 5 marla DHA house tops out around 1,630 square feet of walled covered area — before the porch, which is allowed to occupy the front clear space.
Height is 35 feet from road crown, and it is ground-plus-one only; a second floor is flatly prohibited. The mumty is capped at 175 square feet on 10 marla and below (300 on kanal plots) and must cover the stairs only — no sneaking in a rooftop room. Basements are allowed as a single level up to your full permissible footprint, with an affidavit, and they do not count as a storey.
What trips people up
Two things, mostly. First, the internet repeats a '90% coverage on 5 marla' figure that is not in the official text — the geometry gives you about 72% walled coverage, and it only feels like more because the porch sits in the clear space. Second, DHA issues policy letters between editions of the booklet, so the office's current interpretation beats any PDF, including ours. Our estimator encodes the official 2014 geometry and tells you where a figure is disputed — but the final word always comes from the DHA office, in writing.