Skip the station lockers
Melbourne's three central stations are the obvious place to look for a locker, and two of them don't have one. Southern Cross's official status is genuinely unresolved (more on that below), Melbourne Central's lockers have been removed, and what gets called a 'locker' at Flinders Street is actually a staffed counter with its own rules. The practical answer for most of central Melbourne now runs through app-based storage networks — Radical Storage, Stasher, Bounce, LuggageHero and Nannybag all book a bag into an ordinary shop, café or hotel near the station or sight you actually want, checked in by QR code rather than a coin slot.
Southern Cross Station
Radical Storage and Stasher both state that Southern Cross Station has no official on-site luggage storage. Other guides disagree, describing lockers still in place but priced anywhere from roughly A$10 to A$26 a day and frequently out of order. Nothing here resolves that contradiction, so the sensible approach is to not rely on it either way and book a nearby app-based spot instead. Southern Cross connects directly to the SkyBus from the airport and sits inside the CBD's free tram zone, so a storage point near neighbouring Flagstaff Station covers the same ground — one Bounce-partnered store, for instance, sits about six minutes from Southern Cross and seven from Flagstaff, which gives a sense of how close together these hubs are.
Flinders Street: the staffed option
What's often described as lockers at Flinders Street is actually Travellers Aid, a charity-run bag storage desk on the main concourse near the escalators between platforms 9 and 10. It offers concession rates to concession-card holders and students 25 and under, and a saving specifically when three or more bags are stored together. Reportedly, access involves tapping a Myki card and the counter isn't always staffed. More importantly, during school holidays, public holidays and major events, Travellers Aid can decline new bags if it's at capacity — so it isn't a guaranteed drop-off at busy times, and a booked app-based alternative nearby is worth having as a backup rather than a first resort.
Melbourne Central Station
Two independent operators, Stasher and Urloker, confirm that Melbourne Central Station's public lockers have been removed, and that neither the station nor the attached shopping centre offers luggage storage of its own. Any older guide describing lockers there is out of date. App-based storage in the surrounding blocks is the substitute.
Queen Victoria Market
Queen Victoria Market has no on-site luggage storage facility of its own. It's also worth checking the calendar before travelling with bags at all: the market is reportedly closed to the public on Mondays and Wednesdays outside the summer Wednesday night market. Storage booked in the surrounding streets fills the gap for stallholders' worth of shopping or an early arrival before checking into accommodation.
St Kilda and the bay
St Kilda Pier has no storage facility of its own, so a day trip to see the Little Penguins on the breakwater or an afternoon at Luna Park needs bags sorted beforehand. St Kilda is also one of the areas where Melbourne's backpacker accommodation clusters, alongside Fitzroy and North Melbourne, so demand for storage here is real rather than incidental. One local operator, BagBoyz, works differently to the fixed-locker model entirely: staff meet travellers kerbside, take the bags, and deliver them back later to a hotel, an Airbnb, the airport or elsewhere in the city, at one flat price regardless of the time of day.
Melbourne Airport
Melbourne Airport's official storage is run by Smartecarte, in the Arrivals area of Terminals 2 and 4, open 24 hours, and has operated there since 2006. Reportedly, its locker-style pricing runs somewhere in the region of A$12-20 a day, against roughly A$7.50 per bag per day through nearby partner networks — worth comparing before defaulting to the terminal counter, especially for a long layover between an early checkout and a late flight.
Peak-time risk
Every network flags the same problem at busy times: during major events, school holidays and public holidays, finding several lockers together — or any locker at all — gets harder, and Travellers Aid can refuse new bags outright once it's full. Booking ahead through an app-based network secures a specific slot rather than hoping a walk-up spot has room, and it's worth confirming the chosen location is actually open at both the planned drop-off and pickup times, since these are ordinary shops and cafés keeping their own hours rather than council-run infrastructure.
Finding the actual door
A recurring complaint across Radical Storage's Melbourne location reviews is that partner points are hard to find — a shopfront with little or no signage referencing the storage service, sometimes meaning travellers have to look for an unrelated business, like a gift shop or supermarket, at the same address. Once found, though, check-in itself is quick and handled by QR code rather than a queue.
