Road Tunnels in Australia — Complete List by Length

• 38entries listed
• 7.5 kmlongest bore
• 1992–2023openings span
• 51.2 kmtotal length

The record table

Figures on this page were last checked against operator and administration sources on 2 September 2026.

How this archive measures: lengths, bores, dates and ordering

How this table is compiled

Where one of these 35 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Australia, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. The 35 rows for Australia are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2023 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

Lengths for Australia are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 50 m and not a rounded figure. The longest entry is 150.0 times the shortest and 13.6 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

A new scheme in Australia would have to beat 7.5 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The dated entries fall across 12 different years, which is a rough measure of whether this was a sustained programme or a handful of separate schemes.

2 of the 35 measured entries exceed five kilometres, and those are the ones that carry a full ventilation and escape regime. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 51.2 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Dated entries run from 1992 to 2023, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 14 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 38 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening, State and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Reading the figures

The dated entries carry 12 distinct opening years across 31 years, and the median opening year is 2001. Read down the length (m) column, the 37 values run from 50 m to 7 500 m with a midpoint at 650 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Eighth on the list is Sydney Harbour at 2.28 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The ten longest average 3.81 km against 0.52 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.

Roughly 18 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 16 distinct places and structures — Sydney, Brisbane and Hill among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The material on this page is held in 14 captions rather than in running text, 121 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together. Ventilation and escape provision, not bore length, drive most of the cost on modern road tunnels in Australia.

The longest entry is WestConnex M4-M5 Link, at 7.5 km, opened in 2023. 37 of the 38 rows carry an entry in the notes column — 97 per cent of the table — and that column is where the qualifications live: tube counts, closures, boundaries and the reason a figure reads the way it does.