The cooling air in a rotating machine is subject to windage as it passes over the rotor surface, particularly for cases where nonaxisymmetric features such as boltheads are encountered. The ability to accurately predict windage can help reduce the quantity of cooling air required, resulting in increased efficiency. Previous work has shown that the steady computational fluid dynamics solutions can give reasonable predictions for the effects of bolts on disc moment for a rotor–stator cavity with throughflow but flow velocities and disc temperature are not well predicted. Large fluctuations in velocities have been observed experimentally in some cases. Time-dependent computational fluid dynamics simulations reported here bring to light the unsteady nature of the flow. Unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes calculations for 120° and 360° models of the rotor–stator cavity with 9 and 18 bolts were performed in order to better understand the flow physics. Although the rotor–stator cavity with bolts is geometrically steady in the rotating frame of reference, it was found that the bolts generate unsteadiness which creates time-dependent rotating flow features within the cavity. At low throughflow conditions, the unsteady flow significantly increases the average disc temperature.