Australian irrigated cotton growers are committed to improving their Water Use Efficiency (WUE) for economic, environmental, social and political reasons (Breen et al, 2006). Furrow irrigation is the dominant irrigation system and is used all over Australian by irrigated cotton growers, who are committed to improving their water use efficiency for economic, environmental, social and political reasons. The Australian cotton industry is predominantly irrigated by furrow irrigation with siphons. Increasing the performance of such systems generally requires an intensification of the existing labour requirements while the current labour force is dwindling. Various alternatives have and are being considered but there is a lack of data that exists about comparisons of alternatives to fully optimised furrow irrigated field and even more so a lack of data about the individual potential of each system to perform better. The siphon-less project was developed to address this knowledge gap by using the same methods to measure and the same water use efficiency indices to assess the performance of each alternative system and an adjacent furrow irrigated field. Four systems, located throughout the Border Rivers and Lower Balonne catchments, were assessed over the 2005/06 summer including: Overhead Irrigation (Lateral Move), Bank-less Channel, Bank-less Head Ditch and Pipes Through the Banks. The following water use efficiency indices were calculated: Gross production Water Use Efficiency Index, Application Efficiency and Distribution Uniformity. In addition final infiltration rates, gross margin including development, operational and input costs were generated for each field under investigation. Results have demonstrated that the siphon-less irrigation systems compared reasonably well and in one case exceeded the water use efficiency of the adjacent furrow irrigated field. The development of siphon-less systems is more costly while the operating costs vary between systems. All systems have shown that there is still room for improvement. While furrow irrigation with siphons remains the pre-dominant irrigation method of the Australian cotton industry, efforts towards improving the performance of this system still remains of paramount importance.