The Major Digital Projects Report 2026 provides a snapshot of how Australia’s biggest government digital projects are performing, including their benefits to the public and the challenges they face. It covers 103 projects across 43 agencies, representing over $9.7 billion of investment including $5.9 billion in digital technologies.1 The report finds that these projects are delivering positive outcomes for Australians – improving government services, protecting data and modernising critical systems – but that some projects are encountering significant risks and challenges that threaten on-time, on-budget delivery.
Stronger oversight and improvement
All Tier 1 and Tier 2 projects2 now report delivery confidence assessments, and most are on track, with 60.0% rated Medium-High or High.3 While the share of projects in these top confidence bands is unchanged from last year, they now account for 69.5% of total investment (up from 52.9% in 2025). Tier 1 has improved most: 74.2% of Tier 1 investment is in Medium-High or High confidence projects (up from 39.4% in 2025), while the average budget of lower-confidence Tier 1 projects has halved, from $256.0 million to $137.9 million. In effect, delivery risk has migrated to smaller investments, which are more agile to remediate – strengthening overall resilience of the government’s digital portfolio.
Risks and pressures
Despite recent improvements in overall delivery confidence, there are emerging short-term pressures. One-third of projects reporting a Medium or lower delivery confidence have a planned completion date within the next 6 months. This reflects a heightened risk profile associated with compressed delivery timelines, resource constraints, and the complexity in the final stages of project integration and closure. Projects at this stage of implementation are more susceptible to schedule slippage and quality risks, particularly where dependencies and residual issues converge late in the delivery cycle.
