Australia Wins 25 Michelin Keys, Melbourne Loses 2

Australia had the biggest Michelin Key year of any established market: 22 hotels gained a Key and three moved up a tier, against three removals. The country ends the 2026 selection with 54 Key hotels against 35, a net gain of nineteen.

Melbourne gained two and lost two, and finished with exactly the four Key hotels it had a year ago.

Chart: hotels that gained or lost MICHELIN Key standing in the 2026 selection. Source: MICHELIN Guide 2026 Key selection, released 18 September 2026, compared against the 2025 selection. Every hotel counted here was read from the Guide's own listings; every loss was re-checked on the hotel's own Guide page.

The scoreboard

Movement	Hotels
New Keys awarded	22
Upgraded a tier	3
Dropped a tier	0
Key removed	3
Key hotels, 2025 → 2026	35 → 54

What gained

Hotel	Where	2025	2026	Change
Sequoia Lodge	Adelaide	no Key	Two Keys	New Key
Ardour Milton Park	Bowral	no Key	One Key	New Key
Blackbird Byron Bay	Mullumbimby Creek	no Key	One Key	New Key
Chalets at Blackheath	Blackheath	no Key	One Key	New Key
El Questro - The Homestead	Kununurra	no Key	One Key	New Key
Gaia Retreat & Spa	Brooklet	no Key	One Key	New Key
Halcyon House	Cabarita Beach	no Key	One Key	New Key
InterContinental Sorrento Mornington Peninsula	Sorrento	no Key	One Key	New Key
InterContinental Sydney Coogee Beach by IHG	Sydney	no Key	One Key	New Key
Lanson Place Parliament Gardens	Melbourne	no Key	One Key	New Key
Le Mas Barossa	Tanunda	no Key	One Key	New Key
Lon Retreat & Spa	Point Lonsdale	no Key	One Key	New Key
Maleny Lodge	Maleny	no Key	One Key	New Key
Mount Lofty House & Estate	Adelaide	no Key	One Key	New Key
Mt Mulligan Lodge	Mount Mulligan	no Key	One Key	New Key
Pretty Beach House	Pretty Beach	no Key	One Key	New Key
Sticky Rice Villas	Adelaide	no Key	One Key	New Key
The Corinda Collection	Hobart	no Key	One Key	New Key
The Langham Melbourne	Melbourne	no Key	One Key	New Key
The Porter House Hotel Sydney - MGallery	Sydney	no Key	One Key	New Key
The Sanctuary at Alba Thermal Springs & Spa	Fingal	no Key	One Key	New Key
The Sundays	Hamilton Island	no Key	One Key	New Key
Saffire Freycinet	Coles Bay	Two Keys	Three Keys	Upgraded
Southern Ocean Lodge	Kangaroo Island	Two Keys	Three Keys	Upgraded
Capella Sydney	Sydney	One Key	Two Keys	Upgraded

What lost ground

Hotel	Where	2025	2026	Change
Ace Hotel Sydney	Sydney	One Key	no Key	Key removed
Hyde Melbourne Place	Melbourne	One Key	no Key	Key removed
The Interlude	Melbourne	One Key	no Key	Key removed

Melbourne stood still

The city's two additions are The Langham Melbourne and Lanson Place Parliament Gardens, both at One Key. Its two removals are Hyde Melbourne Place and The Interlude, both of which held One Key in the inaugural 2025 selection and hold none now. Both remain in the Guide's hotel selection.

That leaves Melbourne on four Key hotels, unchanged, while Sydney moved from nine to ten and the country as a whole added nineteen.

City	Key hotels 2025	Key hotels 2026
Sydney	9	10
Melbourne	4	4

Victoria as a state did better than its capital: seven hotels moved, five of them upward, with the gains landing outside the city — InterContinental Sorrento and The Sanctuary at Alba Thermal Springs on the Mornington Peninsula, and Lon Retreat & Spa at Point Lonsdale. The state's highest-ranked hotel remains Jackalope, on the Mornington Peninsula rather than in Melbourne.

The top tier went to the islands

Australia's two upgrades to Three Keys both went well away from the mainland capitals: Southern Ocean Lodge on Kangaroo Island and Saffire Freycinet on Tasmania's east coast, each moving from Two Keys to Three. Capella Sydney moved from One Key to Two.

That is consistent with how MICHELIN describes the region. The Guide places Oceania's top distinctions among remote island resorts and coastal architecture, and treats the major cities separately, as a matter of historic properties and underrated finds.

State or territory	Hotels that moved in 2026
New South Wales	10
Victoria	7
South Australia	5
Queensland	3
Tasmania	2
Western Australia	1

Three removals

Alongside Melbourne's two, Ace Hotel Sydney lost the One Key it held in 2025. All three remain listed by the Guide without a Key, and none of the removals was mentioned in the announcement.

For a market that added nineteen hotels net, three removals is a low rate. The point is not that Australia went backwards — it plainly did not. It is that a city can post a headline-grabbing national number and, locally, not move at all.

The wider 2026 picture

Worldwide the Key list grew 15.3 percent in a year, from 2,457 hotels to 2,832. That growth was not evenly spread across the tiers: One-Key hotels rose 16.0 percent and Two-Key hotels 14.9 percent, while Three-Key hotels rose only 8.4 percent, from 143 to 155. The top tier's share of the list fell from 5.82 percent to 5.47 percent.

Tier	2025	2026	Change
Three Keys	143	155	+8.4%
Two Keys	572	657	+14.9%
One Key	1,742	2,020	+16.0%
All Key hotels	2,457	2,832	+15.3%

Growth on that scale means removals are easy to miss. Across our full reading of the 2026 selection, 482 hotels gained a Key they did not hold in 2025 and 86 moved up a tier, while 85 lost their Key outright and 28 dropped a tier. The Guide publicises the additions; the subtractions arrive without an announcement.

How these numbers were checked

Every hotel named above was read from the MICHELIN Guide's own country listings, where each property carries an explicit One-, Two- or Three-Key marking, and the totals reconcile to the counts the Guide published on 18 September 2026.

Losses were then checked a second time, one hotel at a time, against that property's own page on the Guide. That second pass matters: a hotel missing from a country listing has not necessarily lost anything, because several properties that plainly still hold Keys never appear in those listings at all. Only a hotel that the Guide still lists, without a Key, has actually lost one. Every removal and downgrade in this article cleared both checks.

One property in this round did something different again: where a hotel's Guide page has been taken down entirely, it has left the selection rather than merely lost its Key, and that is stated as such rather than counted as a downgrade.

What a MICHELIN Key is

MICHELIN introduced the Key in 2024 as the hotel counterpart to its restaurant Star. Inspectors assess architecture, interior design, service, character, consistency and value across a selection of more than 9,000 hotels in over 100 countries, and award One, Two or Three Keys: a very special stay, an exceptional one, an extraordinary one. Nightly rate is not a criterion, which is why a four-cottage property and a 500-room resort can hold the same distinction.

The 2026 selection, the second, named 2,832 Key hotels worldwide — 155 with Three Keys, 657 with Two and 2,020 with One — against 2,457 a year earlier. The criteria are set out in the Guide's explainer on the Key, and the full country-by-country list is published here.