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

Every coastal town says it lives off tourism. Coffs Harbour is one of the places where the figures actually bear that out, and they bear it out plainly. The economic profile the City of Coffs Harbour publishes through economy.id carries a modelled estimate of the local tourism economy, and for 2024/25 it puts tourism at 14.0% of the region's total industry output. The comparable figure for New South Wales as a whole is 9.3%. On value added, the measure that strips out the cost of inputs and counts the wealth the activity actually generates, the local share is again 14.0%, against 9.4% for the state. Whichever of the two headline measures you prefer, tourism does about half again as much of the economic work in Coffs Harbour as it does across NSW on average.

The jobs number is the one most readers will feel. The same series puts tourism employment in Coffs Harbour at 4,741 jobs in 2024/25, which is 12.0% of all local employment. For the state, the equivalent share is 9.6%. Twelve per cent is roughly one in eight local jobs, and that is a figure worth sitting with: in a town this size, on the order of one worker in every eight has a job that the modelling attributes, directly or indirectly, to visitors coming and spending. Cafes and accommodation are the obvious part. The indirect part, the laundry contract, the food wholesaler, the tradesperson who maintains the motel, is the larger and less visible half, and we come back to that split below.

The rebound is real, and it is recent

The other half of the story is the direction of travel. The source lets you compare 2024/25 with 2019/20, the year that sits right on the edge of the pandemic, and the movement is large. Tourism output has risen $307.0 million over that span, from $799.95 million to $1,106.91 million. Value added is up $158.1 million, from $392.67 million to $550.81 million. Employment is up 1,424 jobs, from 3,317 to 4,741. In round terms, the modelling has local tourism output up by more than a third and tourism employment up by more than 40% against its pre-COVID base. That is not a gentle recovery drifting back to where it was; it is a sector that, on these figures, is now materially bigger than it was before the shock.

Two honest caveats travel with those change figures, and we state them rather than bury them. The first is that 2019/20 was itself a disrupted year, with the pandemic arriving in its final quarter, so it is a low and slightly unusual base to measure a rebound from. The second is that these are modelled figures in constant 2018-19 prices, which is a real strength, because it means the growth is not just inflation, but also a reminder that the series is an estimate of the economy's shape, not a till-roll of dollars actually rung up. With those caveats noted, the signal is clear enough: visitors did come back to Coffs, and then some.

Our read: a load-bearing sector, which is also an exposure

What follows is our read, offered as opinion and built only on the sourced figures above. The first thing to say is that these numbers reframe what the visitor economy is for a town like Coffs Harbour. When tourism is 14.0% of your economy against a state average of 9.3%, and one in eight of your jobs rides on it against roughly one in ten across NSW, the visitor economy is not a seasonal nice-to-have layered on top of the "real" economy. It is a load-bearing part of how the town works and who has a job. A decision that affects visitor numbers, a road that reroutes them, an event that draws them, a policy that helps or hinders accommodation, lands harder here than the same decision would in an average NSW community, because the base it acts on is proportionally larger.

The second thing is that concentration cuts both ways, and it is worth naming the risk as plainly as the strength. A town where roughly one in eight jobs depends on visitors captures more of the upside when the visitors come. The 2019/20-to-2024/25 rebound is exactly that upside made visible: when tourism turns up, a tourism-heavy town gains more than a diversified one. But the same concentration means the town carries more of the downside when visitors do not come, whether that is a wet summer, a cost-of-living squeeze on discretionary travel, or a shock on the scale of the pandemic that the 2019/20 figures sit right before. The higher-than-average share is a measure of dependence as much as of success. This is the same concentration logic that runs through the region's blueberry economy, where a large slice of local activity leans on a single sector: the upside is real and so is the exposure, and a place is wise to know which of its eggs are in which basket. We draw no alarm from this, and we forecast nothing; we simply note that a 14% share is a number a community should hold in both hands.

We are careful about the limits of what this source lets us say. It is a tourism value series, not a visitor headcount, so we make no claim about how many people visited, how many nights they stayed or where they came from, because the page does not carry those figures and we will not invent them. It is a modelled estimate, not a survey, so we treat the shares as well-founded approximations rather than exact counts. And it describes the size and shape of the sector, not its causes; we do not attribute the rebound to any particular policy, project or campaign. What the record supports, and all it supports, is that tourism is a larger share of Coffs Harbour's economy and jobs than it is of the state's, and that the sector is now bigger than it was before COVID. That is enough to be worth knowing.