Community + the Visitor Economy + Arts

Community

The institutions, culture and country of the coast: the local organisations that hold the towns together, the arts and festivals that run from Coffs Harbour to Bellingen, and the distinctive arts-and-environment surface of the Bellingen shire. Arts Mid North Coast spans all five councils and is a genuine regional culture body; we follow it, the chambers of commerce and the major seasonal events.

This is also where the visitor economy sits, the industry that carries much of the coast. Event dates and status are verified each season before we publish, and where a story turns on numbers it carries a methodology note.

Community + the Visitor Economy + Arts

Coffs Harbour earns the most from each visitor on the mid north coast, and it is not because they spend more per day

Coffs Harbour takes the fewest visitors of the three councils in this dataset and earns the most money: $578 a trip, against $487 in Port Macquarie-Hastings and $383 in Mid-Coast. But per night Coffs is the cheaper of the two big earners, $207 against Port Macquarie’s $228. The whole gap is a fourth night. Kempsey, Nambucca Valley and Bellingen have no profile in this dataset at all.

29 August 2026

Community + the Visitor Economy + Arts

Coffs Harbour leans on visitors more than most of New South Wales: tourism is 14% of the local economy and about one in eight jobs

On the latest modelled estimates, tourism is 14.0% of Coffs Harbour's economy by output and value added, against 9.3% and 9.4% for New South Wales, and it accounts for 4,741 jobs, about 12% of all local employment, roughly one in eight local jobs. Since 2019/20, just before COVID, tourism output is up more than $300 million and employment up more than 1,400 jobs. A read of how much a tourism town leans on visitors, and why that concentration is both a strength and an exposure, read from the economy.id tourism-value series itself.

24 July 2026