If your house shook for a few seconds early on Friday afternoon, it wasn't a truck. A magnitude 3.4 earthquake struck near Appin at 1:07pm on Friday 28 August 2026, and Geoscience Australia has it on the record as felt.
The numbers matter more than the magnitude here. Geoscience Australia puts the epicentre at 34.14°S, 150.72°E — roughly five kilometres south-west of the Menangle Park estate — at a depth of just three kilometres. A shallow quake close by is felt far more sharply than a deeper one further away, which is why a modest 3.4 was noticed at all.
What it was like
Hundreds of people across the area reported feeling it. The common description was about five seconds of shaking, with a noise that people said didn't sound like the heavy vehicles they're used to hearing. Houses creaked the way they do in strong wind.
No injuries or property damage have been reported.
Is more coming?
Geoscience Australia's seven-day list of recorded earthquakes shows no aftershocks in New South Wales since — Friday's quake is the only NSW event on it.
This also isn't the first time the ground has moved around here. Appin recorded a magnitude 3.6 earthquake on 28 May 2025, and the Appin–Douglas Park area has logged several small quakes in recent years.
Where the official record is
Geoscience Australia is the agency that monitors and reports Australian earthquakes, and its Earthquakes@GA map is the primary record — this event is logged as ga2026qzrmds. If you felt it, GA takes felt reports through the same site; those reports are what build the shaking maps for events like this one.
Preliminary magnitude and depth figures are sometimes revised as seismologists review the data, so treat the numbers above as GA's current record rather than the last word.