T cells can contribute to clearance of respiratory viruses that cause acute-resolving infections like SARS-CoV-2, helping to provide long-lived protection against disease following infection. Recent studies suggested an additional role for T cells in resisting overt infection; pre-existing cross-reactive responses to the highly conserved SARS-CoV-2 replication transcription complex (RTC) were preferentially enriched in healthcare workers who had abortive infections (1) and non-spike cross-reactive T cells were associated with protection against infection in household contacts (2). We hypothesise that such early viral control would require pre-existing cross-reactive memory T cells already resident at the site of infection. Airway-resident CD4+T cells have been shown to be critical for mediating protection following intra-nasal vaccination in a murine model of SARS-CoV3, but have not been reported in the context of human SARS-CoV-2. We used bronchoalveolar lavage samples from the lower respiratory tract of healthy donors obtained prior to the COVID-19 pandemic to probe for T cell specificities previously found to be preferentially enriched in the blood of donors with abortive infection(1). Our data reveal the potential to harness functional airway-resident SARS-CoV-2-reactive T cells in next-generation mucosal vaccines.