Yes, and in most of the village the rules won't get in your way. Listed buildings are rare. There's one conservation area, over in Grayshott. Planning applications come in all year round. Heritage won't stop you, but the ground under the house deserves more attention.
Hindhead has 28 listed buildings. None is Grade I, 1 is Grade II* and 27 are Grade II. Listing covers the whole building, inside and out, so changing one of those 28 needs listed building consent on top of any planning permission, and a new kitchen can turn into a correspondence course. Among a village's worth of homes, 28 is a short list. Most buyers here will never meet the listing rules, and anyone who does will have found out from the estate particulars long before the builder arrives.
There's one conservation area in the area, Grayshott. Conservation area status brings closer scrutiny of changes to a building's outside, and it can remove some of the automatic rights to extend that apply elsewhere. If the house you're buying is in Grayshott, check the council's conservation area guidance before you sketch anything. If it isn't, that particular layer of rules doesn't apply.
The neighbours clearly aren't put off. From April 2024 to June 2026, 287 planning applications were submitted in the area, 121 of them in the last twelve months. That's a steady run of extensions, alterations and new plans on a ridge where the typical home already has room to spare. The application count covers submissions only and says nothing about how many were approved. It does tell you the council is used to seeing plans from Hindhead, and that the people next door are unlikely to object to a loft conversion on principle.
The ground needs more thought than the paperwork. On the British Geological Survey's shrink-swell classification, the whole area reaches class 3. Shrink-swell ground expands when wet and shrinks when dry, and an extension built on shallow foundations can end up moving differently from the house it's attached to. This is a published hazard class, not a reason to panic. It means asking a structural engineer about foundation depth before the builder quotes, and taking any existing cracks seriously at the survey. The trees near a proposed extension are worth asking about too, since roots draw moisture out of the ground.
In practice, outside the listed buildings and the Grayshott conservation area, many smaller changes may fall under permitted development, which lets you extend without a full application within set limits. Those limits have conditions, and some land in the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty gets closer attention. Ask Waverley for a lawful development certificate before building anything you're relying on permitted development to cover. It costs less than a legal argument after the extension is up.
Your freedom to extend in Hindhead is middling. The heritage rules are light, but between the protected corners and the moving ground, you need to check your own plot before you build anything.