Australian Tunnelling Conference 2026: Dates, Program and What Contractors Need to Know

The Australian Tunnelling Conference is the country's flagship forum for tunnelling and underground construction — a place where tunnelling engineers, contractors, asset owners and industry experts share best practice in tunnelling design, construction and maintenance. Two related things carry the name in the current calendar: the 21st Australian Tunnelling Conference run by Informa Connect in Sydney, and ATC2027, the Australian Tunnelling Society's own conference in Brisbane. Both are covered below.

The 21st Australian Tunnelling Conference runs 25-26 November 2026 at the UTS Aerial Function Centre in Sydney, NSW. The Aerial Function Centre sits on Broadway in Ultimo, on the southern edge of the Sydney CBD, a short walk from Central Station. Registration and sponsorship or exhibition packages are handled through Informa Connect Australia. Register early — underground construction is running at record levels and the room fills with the delivery teams behind the pipeline.

The Australian Tunnelling Society (ATS) — a technical society of Engineers Australia and a member of the International Tunnelling Association — will hold ATC2027 in Brisbane from 8 to 11 November 2027, under the theme “Shaping an Underground Future: Technology, Sustainability & Resilience.” That program spans the full tunnelling lifecycle: operations, asset renewal and transformation, and resource and post-mining applications of underground space, plus planning and societal integration. If you plan two years out, put both in the diary.

Australia's underground pipeline is unusually deep: metro rail, road tunnels, water and sewer mains, pumped hydro and underground mining developments are all competing for the same TBMs, shotcrete crews, geotechnical specialists and shift supervisors. That competition is the real theme of the conference. Anyone who supplies plant, labour or maintenance into tunnelling is being asked to deliver more, faster, with tighter safety and environmental scrutiny than the last cycle.

Tunnelling and geotechnical engineers, design consultants and TBM specialists, tier-one and tier-two construction contractors, project directors and delivery authorities, government departments covering infrastructure, mines, water and environment, asset owners and operators, equipment and materials suppliers, academics and researchers, and the subcontractors who supply plant, fabrication, electrical and maintenance services underground. It is a mixed engineering-and-delivery room, not a pure academic one.

The people who set the specifications are in the room. You hear the project pipeline before it becomes a tender — which packages are coming, which methods are being chosen, and which delivery model each project will use. You also hear where the last job hurt: ventilation compliance, plant availability, shift handover records, and workforce ticketing come up in every case-study session. Those are the exact areas where subcontractors get scored during prequalification.

Underground work is one of the most heavily evidenced environments in Australian construction. Expect requests for worker competencies and confined-space and underground inductions, plant registers with current service and inspection history, lifting gear and pressure equipment certification, calibration records for gas detection and monitoring, pre-start records, isolation permits, and incident reporting with documented close-out. Most subcontractors can do the work; fewer can produce the paperwork on the day it is asked for.

Send someone who can answer scope and capability questions without a phone call back to the office. Prioritise the project case-study sessions over the vendor pitches — that is where scope, sequencing and pain points get named out loud. Take notes against the specific projects you already service or want to. Ask each principal contractor who runs their subcontractor prequalification and what system they use, then start it that week. Follow up within seven days referencing the session, not your capability statement.

25-26 November puts the Australian Tunnelling Conference in a crowded fortnight. It follows MESC WA (17-18 November, Perth) and AusIMM's Strategic Mine Planning Conference (17-19 November, Perth), and comes after IMARC (27-29 October, Sydney). The ATS also runs its Short Course in Melbourne on 1-2 December 2026 — a two-day introduction to tunnelling and underground space engineering aimed at early-career practitioners, held every two years since 2007.