The Murray Darling Basin Authority has indicated its confidence that the dam will reach capacity now that it has eclipsed 80 per cent.

"We're at that point now where we're starting to get a pretty high degree of confidence that the storage will fill this season," head of river operations Andrew Reynolds said.

"When we do make pre-releases we'll endeavor to keep them within the channel capacity downstream where flooding impacts would be very minor.

"It's worth understanding that when we get to about 80 per cent that's a level in the dam where it's appropriate to start considering pre-releases."

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Mr Reynolds says the water authority has three key priorities which are protection of infrastructure, maximising storage and reducing downstream flooding.

He said those considerations were prioritised in that order.

He also said the current water situation was not unlike that of 2016 and the challenge now was managing inflows that come in over the next few weeks.

"If we just continue to get inflows into storage like we're seeing now, the storage will fill but we'll be able to pass that water downsteam with relatively little impact downstream," he said.

"The issue comes for us if we come to a full storage and we get a really heavy wet period over several days or we get a rainfall event followed later by another large rainfall event.

"The large floods that occurred in 2016 were off the back of quite intense rainfall over a week-long period or a little bit longer.

"We don't really have a sense of whether we can expect similar events like that in the coming year.

"In 2016 we got about 150mm over a few days and then a few days later we got similar intense rainfall."

General manager of water and agriculture at the Bureau of Meteorology Matt Coulton said that the current conditions meant that river systems would respond quickly to rain events.

"The catchment is wetter than it's been in several years and what this means is that it won't take very much rain to produce quite a rapid response in river levels," he said.

In the event that the Hume Dam spills, manager of water resources at Goulburn-Murray Water Mark Bailey said that would only affect customers that had water sitting in a spillable water account.

"Customers at the moment won't see any impact, we've only got eight or so gigalitres of water sitting in spillable water accounts at the moment with a current 31 per cent allocation on the Victorian-Murray customers," he said.