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Objectives. The aim of the present study was to explore nurse perceptions of safety climate in acute Australian hospitals. Methods. Participants included 420 nurses who have worked on 24 acute wards from six Australian hospitals. The Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ) Short Form was used to quantify nurse perceptions of safety climate and benchmarked against international data. Generalised linear mixed models were used to explore factors that may influence safety climate. Results. On average, 53.5% of nurses held positive attitudes towards job satisfaction followed by teamwork climate (50.5%). There was variability in SAQ domain scores across hospitals. The safety climate and perceptions of hospital management domains also varied across wards within a hospital. Nurseswhohad worked longer at a hospital were more likely to have poorer perceptions of hospital management (β = -5.2; P = 0.014). Overall, nurse perceptions of safety climate appeared higher than international data. Conclusions. The perceptions of nurses working in acute Victorian and New South Wales hospitals varied between hospitals as well as across wards within each hospital. This highlights the importance of surveying all hospital wards and examining the results at the ward level when implementing strategies to improve patient safety and the culture of safety in organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]