In the field of disaster management the detection and classification of building damage play an important role. Airborne lidar data is very suitable as a basis for damage analyses because it can be acquired for large areas directly after a disaster. In building damage classification methods, plane surfaces extracted from post‐event lidar data are often used as one input. Various different algorithms exist for automatic plane detection from lidar data, of which two are presented in this paper and applied to lidar data of undamaged and damaged buildings. Finally, the suitability of these two algorithms for a more detailed building damage classification is studied and analysed.