A reliable understanding of linkages between meteorological, hydrological and agricultural droughts (MD, HD and AD respectively) is crucial to building resilience and planning for future climate changes. Despite Australia being prone to severe droughts, lagtimes of propagation (and recovery) from meteorological to hydrological and agricultural droughts across its large hydroclimatic regions are not well understood. Therefore, we investigate the characteristics of drought propagation and recovery time lags for droughts of four timescales and a combination of drought onset and cessation criteria in 407 unregulated catchments within six major precipitation zones across Australia. We find that the propagation and recovery lags are dependent on climatic conditions, drought criteria and timescales. The average propagation times from MD to HD across Australia varied from 0.8 to 1.7 months for monthly timescales, increasing to 2 to 4.5 months for 12-monthly timescales. The corresponding recovery lagtimes were 1.3 to 3.7 and 1.7 to 7.5 months respectively. Similarly, the average propagation times from MD to AD ranged from 0.9 to 1.9 months for monthly timescales, increasing to 0.8 to 5 months for 12-monthly timescales. The corresponding recovery lagtimes were 0.7 to 2.8 and 0.3 to 9.4 months respectively. For droughts of smaller timescales, propagation and recovery lags are linearly correlated with recovery lagtimes consistently greater than the propagation times. As the timescale increases, these relationships weaken suggesting effects of other catchment attributes (e.g. groundwater contributions) on lag relationships. Notably, recovery lagtimes are generally longer for the high-yielding catchments in eastern Australia compared to the other regions