The Disaster Ready Fund Round (DRF) is the Australian Government’s flagship disaster resilience and risk reduction initiative

The objectives of the program are to:

• increase the understanding of natural disaster impacts, as a first step towards reducing the risk of future natural disaster impacts,
• increase the resilience, adaptive capacity and/or preparedness of governments, community service organisations and affected communities to future natural disasters to minimise the potential impact of natural hazards and reduce the risk of future natural disasters, and
• reduce the exposure to risk, harm and/or severity of a future natural disaster’s impacts, including reducing the recovery burden for governments, cohorts at disproportionate risk, and/or affected communities.

Round Three (2025-26) of the DRF will build on previous rounds by making a further $200 million available for natural disaster risk reduction and resilience initiatives in 2025-26. Of the total amount available:

• $138,000,000.00 notionally allocated for infrastructure investment (infrastructure funding stream) encompassing the following primary project activity types as defined in the Glossary to the Guidelines: 
• investment in grey infrastructure 
• investment in green-blue infrastructure (including nature based solutions) 
• investment in social infrastructure 
• investment in natural hazard monitoring infrastructure 
• $59,000,000.00 notionally allocated for other eligible project types, and 
• $3,000,000.00 notionally allocated for administrative support for Lead Agencies. 

There is no maximum grant amount, but grants cannot exceed the total available budget. The minimum total project value is $500,000 for infrastructure funding stream projects, with no minimum for other types.