Cape Range campgrounds near Exmouth release monthly on Park Stay WA at 10am AWST. The 2026–27 release dates, how the queue works, stay limits, and what to do when you miss out.
The short version
Camping inside Cape Range National Park, on the Ningaloo Coast near Exmouth, is booked on Park Stay WA. Since September 2026 the Ningaloo Coast campgrounds no longer use the rolling 180-day window that the rest of Western Australia uses. Instead, a whole month of stays is released at once: 10:00am AWST on the first Tuesday of each month, six months ahead.
That means if you want to camp at Osprey Bay, Mesa, Kurrajong, Yardie Creek, Tulki Beach, Neds or North Mandu, you need to know two things: the date your month opens, and what to do if you aren't fast enough on the day. This guide covers both.
The 2026–27 release dates
These come from DBCA's September 2026 booking guide for the Ningaloo Coast World Heritage Area (PDF) and the DBCA announcement that made the monthly release permanent.
| Stays in | Bookings open (10:00am AWST) |
|---|
| April 2027 | Tuesday 6 October 2026 (already open) |
| May 2027 | Tuesday 3 November 2026 |
| June 2027 | Tuesday 1 December 2026 |
| July 2027 | Tuesday 5 January 2027 |
| August 2027 | Tuesday 2 February 2027 |
| September 2027 (to 24 September) | Tuesday 2 March 2027 |
| October 2027 (and from 24 September) | Tuesday 6 April 2027 |
Two notes from DBCA. First, the blocks don't always line up with calendar months: the end of a block is sometimes pulled forward so a long weekend or a WA school holiday period opens on one day rather than being split across two releases. Second, these dates are for the whole Ningaloo Coast, so the same Tuesday also opens the Warroora Coast campgrounds (14 Mile, Sandy Point, Lagoon) and, when they reopen, the Nyinggulara National Park campgrounds.
A watch on nights that haven't been released yet fires when they open on release morning, but it won't get you through the queue, so diary the date yourself. See the Ningaloo monthly release explained for how the day itself works.
Which campgrounds are in Cape Range?
Cape Range National Park runs down the west side of North West Cape, south of Exmouth. All of its campgrounds are inside the monthly-release zone. The ones we monitor, with site counts from the Park Stay WA catalogue:
- Osprey Bay — 46 sites. The biggest and the most contested. Osprey is the one people set an alarm for.
- Mesa — 23 sites.
- Kurrajong — 26 sites.
- Yardie Creek — 10 sites, at the southern end of the sealed road.
- Tulki Beach — 11 sites. Closed for the low-demand season from 1 November to 15 March.
- Neds — 9 sites.
- North Mandu — 5 sites. Also closed 1 November to 15 March.
Cape Range also has Boat Harbour, Bungarra and One K campgrounds, which we don't monitor yet. The DBCA FAQ lists Bungarra alongside North Mandu and Tulki Beach as closed for the low-demand season.
All sites are unpowered. A per-person, per-night camping fee applies, and Cape Range is one of the parks where a vehicle entry fee applies too. When you enter your vehicle registration during booking you can either pay the entry fee with the booking or untick it and buy a park pass separately.
Before release day: get set up
DBCA's own advice is blunt: demand is "extremely high", and most of the people who miss out do so because they weren't ready. Do these before the Tuesday.
- Create your Park Stay WA account now. Bookings must be made from the camper's own account. Someone else can help you at the keyboard, but they can't book for you from their account, and bookings aren't transferable.
- Know your numbers. The booking form asks for campers (adults, concession, children, infants) and every vehicle including towed caravans, camper trailers and boat trailers, with registration numbers. If you enter these before searching, Park Stay sorts the campsites so the ones that fit your rig and are available appear first with a green "Book Now" button.
- Know the stay limits. Up to 14 nights in a park if any night falls in a WA public school holiday period; up to 28 nights otherwise. Bookings over the limit may be cancelled. The 2027 WA holidays that matter here are 10–26 April, 3–18 July and 25 September–10 October.
- One campsite per night, per account. Booking two sites for the same date is a breach, and DBCA says it monitors for it. If your group needs two sites, the second person books the second site from their own account.
- Have backups. Decide in advance whether you'd accept a different campground, or moving sites mid-trip, if your first choice is gone.
On the day
From midnight AWST on release Tuesday the Park Stay WA site closes for bookings for all WA campgrounds, not just Ningaloo. At 10:00am a queue opens. Any queue positions held before 10:00am are thrown away and new positions are allocated at random, so arriving at 9:30am buys you nothing. Arriving at 10:05am puts you behind everyone who was there at 10:00am.
Once you reach the front you get a 30-minute session. The queue "can move quickly and in large steps", so stay on the page: an inactivity warning pops up after one minute without interaction and your session expires if you ignore it. Use one browser, one tab, one device. Use the site's own Back and Quit buttons, not the browser's. And once you've booked, leave, so the queue keeps moving.
Full detail, including what DBCA changed after the February 2026 crashes, is in our Ningaloo release guide.
If you miss out: cancellations are the second release
Here's the thing most people don't realise. Under the old daily-rolling system, Ningaloo had what DBCA called a "very high rate of cancellation": people booked 28-day blocks they never intended to use and trimmed them later. The monthly release cut that dramatically (DBCA reports cancelled nights in August 2026 were almost 80% lower than August 2025), but it didn't eliminate it. Plans still change. Sites still come back.
When they do, they go straight back onto Park Stay WA with no waitlist, and whoever is looking at the page at that moment gets them.
That's what Aussie Camp Alerts is for. You pick the campground and your first and last night, and we check Park Stay WA every few minutes, around the clock. When any of those nights goes from booked out to bookable, you get an email (or Telegram or a push notification on a Summer Pass) with a link straight to the booking page. We never book on your behalf and we never hold sites; you still book from your own account like everyone else.
A practical point for Cape Range: the booking you need is one site for all your nights, not a different site each night. Our alerts are per night at the campground level, so an alert means at least one site opened on that night; check Park Stay WA's site list to see whether one site covers your whole stay.
Cancellation and change rules
From the Park Stay WA terms:
- You can cancel or change dates online up to 11:59pm AWST the day before arrival. From the arrival date you can only shorten your departure.
- Cancellation fee: one concession camper fee per date per campsite removed, unless you remove the date more than 14 days ahead (peak period) or more than five days ahead (non-peak), or within the 48-hour grace period after booking.
- Peak periods are set per campground and shown under "More details" on Park Stay WA.
- Refunds are to the original card, less any cancellation fee.
Because the cancellation fee is small relative to the booking, cancellations don't cluster hard around a single cliff the way they do in Victoria and NSW. They trickle. Which is exactly why a watch beats refreshing.
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