Within the last decade the use of heat as a natural tracer has become an established technique in hydrologic research. As the measure of heat, temperature is a robust and stable environmental parameter and can be collected easily. Nowadays, temperature timeseries are collected in the field and analysed with numerical or analytical tools which allow for the calculation of groundwater flow speed and the estimation of physical parameters of the subsurface. While heat tracer methods have proven their usefulness in groundwater-surface water interaction studies in rivers and lakes (i.e. non-tidal environments), they have not yet been applied to tidal wetlands. Our study fills this knowledge gap and investigates the applicability of heat tracers and its limitations in this rapidly changing environment. Moving with up- or downwelling groundwater, heat tracing techniques make use of the influence of the transported heat on the environment. For a meaningful analysis temperature signals must be suitably registered along a groundwater flow pathway. In rivers and lakes, with their cyclic diurnal thermal regime and a relatively steady hydrology this is usually provided. Tidal wetlands on the other hand experience flooding and draining in a fast succession, which challenges the application of heat tracers. Therefore, we investigated if heat tracing techniques are adequate to identify the rapid hydrologic changes in a tidal wetland. Results from a three-weeks long temperature and hydraulic head time series collected in the Hunter River Estuary near Newcastle, NSW, Australia, show that tidal wetlands provide enough information for heat tracer analysis. In comparison to river and lake systems, the variability of the tides and the offset between their lunar cycle and the diurnal temperature cycle creates even additional information for time-series analysis. However, since the period of the cycles is short, most information is only transported into shallow layers of the subsurface. This means that all measurements must take place in a relative narrow section of the wetland’s sediments, and hence need to be precise and accurate in space.