Coffs Harbour earns the most from each visitor on the mid north coast, and it is not because they spend more per day
Tourism Research Australia publishes a visitor profile for every local government area on one set of definitions, which is the only way three councils on this coast can be set beside each other without arguing about method. Coffs Harbour takes the fewest visitors of the three 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, at $207 against Port Macquarie's $228. The whole gap is a fourth night.
Every figure below is a two-year average for 2023 to 2024, which is how Tourism Research Australia publishes these profiles, and the tourism business counts are a different basis again, flagged where they appear. All three profiles come from the same collection, so nothing needs adjusting between them. The totals are the dashboard's own; we have calculated nothing.
The three councils
| Total | Coffs Harbour | Port Macquarie-Hastings | Mid-Coast |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visitors (000) | 1,665 | 1,709 | 2,220 |
| Nights (000) | 3,893 | 2,863 | 3,876 |
| Average nights | 4 | 3 | 3 |
| Expenditure ($M) | $963 | $831 | $849 |
| Spend per trip | $578 | $487 | $383 |
| Spend per night | $207 | $228 | $192 |
| Spend per night, commercial accommodation | $240 | $271 | $263 |
| Tourism businesses | 874 | 1,052 | 967 |
Read the top two rows together and the shape of it appears. Coffs Harbour and Mid-Coast take almost exactly the same number of visitor nights, 3,893,000 and 3,876,000, and Coffs earns $963 million against Mid-Coast's $849 million from them. Port Macquarie-Hastings takes more visitors than Coffs and a thousand fewer nights, because its visitors average three nights where Coffs averages four.
That fourth night is the whole story of the headline figure. Coffs leads on spend per trip by $91 over Port Macquarie, but its spend per night is $21 lower, and its spend per night in commercial accommodation is $31 lower. On the dashboard's own numbers Coffs Harbour is not the more expensive destination of the two. It is the one people stay in longer.
Where the visitors come from is the other split
| Origin | Coffs Harbour | Port Macquarie-Hastings | Mid-Coast |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interstate visitors | 299 | 169 | 115 |
| Interstate nights | 973 | 498 | 347 |
| Intrastate visitors | 670 | 667 | 1,081 |
| Intrastate nights | 1,967 | 2,031 | 3,388 |
The three councils rank on interstate visitors in exactly the order they rank on spend per trip: Coffs Harbour 299,000, Port Macquarie-Hastings 169,000, Mid-Coast 115,000. Mid-Coast is overwhelmingly a New South Wales destination, with more intrastate visitors than the other two combined and more intrastate nights than either has nights of any kind.
Our reading, and it is a reading rather than a finding: a destination that draws people from interstate is drawing people who have committed to a longer trip, and length is what this data says separates the three. The dataset cannot confirm that, because it does not report spend by origin. We offer it as the obvious inference from two orderings that match, not as something the numbers demonstrate.
Mid-Coast has the thinnest profile, and that is itself worth knowing
| Reason | Coffs Harbour | Port Macquarie-Hastings | Mid-Coast |
|---|---|---|---|
| Holiday | 742 | 767 | 1,251 |
| Visiting friends and relatives | 395 | 422 | 669 |
| Business | 263 | 179 | np |
| Other | 268 | np | np |
np is not zero. Tourism Research Australia defines it as
Data is not publishable as the survey error is too high for practical purposes
. It means
the survey cannot support a number for that cell in that area, not that nobody came. So this
table cannot tell you how much business travel Mid-Coast has, and it cannot rank Port Macquarie
against Coffs on the "other" category.
Mid-Coast carries np in more places than the other two: on business travel, on the other category, and on all three of its top international markets, where the dashboard lists New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom with no publishable visitor or night figures against any of them. Coffs Harbour is the only one of the three with a publishable number in every reason row. Where the international figures do exist they are small: Coffs records 11,000 visitors from the United Kingdom and 5,000 from New Zealand, and Port Macquarie 10,000 from the United Kingdom and 7,000 from the United States.
Port Macquarie has the most tourism businesses, and leads nothing else
| Size | Coffs Harbour | Port Macquarie-Hastings | Mid-Coast |
|---|---|---|---|
| Non-employing | 352 | 391 | 389 |
| 1 to 4 | 263 | 315 | 312 |
| 5 to 19 | 191 | 261 | 219 |
| 20 or more | 68 | 82 | 56 |
| Total | 874 | 1,052 | 967 |
Port Macquarie-Hastings has the most tourism businesses in every size band, and the most businesses employing twenty or more people, while sitting second on visitors and second on expenditure. Coffs Harbour earns the most money from the fewest businesses.
These counts sit on a different basis from everything above. Tourism Research Australia notes
they are based on selected (tourism) ANZISCs from the ABS in the year ending June 2024
, a
point in time from the business register rather than a survey average, and they count firms in
tourism-related categories, much of whose trade serves residents rather than visitors.
Three of this beat's councils are not in this dataset at all. Tourism Research Australia publishes a profile for Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie-Hastings and Mid-Coast. It publishes none for Kempsey, Nambucca Valley or Bellingen, which we confirmed by searching the dashboard's own local government area filter for each of them on 29 August 2026. So nothing here describes the mid north coast as a whole, and it should not be read that way. It describes three councils.
This is a different measure from our earlier Coffs Harbour piece, and the two should not be mixed. We reported in July that tourism is 14% of the Coffs Harbour economy and about one in eight local jobs, using economy.id's modelled series. That is an estimate of what tourism contributes to the local economy. This article counts visitors, nights and what they spent, from a visitor survey. That earlier piece said plainly that its source carries no visitor numbers or nights; these are those numbers, and they come from somewhere else. Neither figure can be substituted for the other.
Sources
- Tourism Research Australia, Local government area profiles (interactive dashboard; the Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie-Hastings and Mid-Coast profiles each read 29 August 2026): all visitor, night, average night, expenditure, spend per trip, spend per night and spend per night in commercial accommodation figures for the three areas including the totals; the interstate and intrastate domestic overnight visitors and nights; the split of visitors by reason for visit; the top international markets; the tourism business counts by employment size; the absence of any profile for Kempsey, Nambucca Valley and Bellingen; and the dashboard's own data notes, being that the data is a two year average from 2023 to 2024, that np means data is not publishable as the survey error is too high for practical purposes, and that the business count is based on selected tourism ANZSIC categories from the ABS in the year ending June 2024.
- Our earlier report, tourism is 14% of the Coffs Harbour economy and about one in eight jobs, for the economy.id modelled series discussed in the note above.
How we did this. Read directly from Tourism Research Australia's local government area profiles dashboard on 29 August 2026, selecting each of the three councils in turn and reading the rendered profile. Every number in the tables is the dashboard's own published figure, including the totals, which we read rather than calculated. We have calculated nothing in this article, and where we compare two figures we have stated both. The reference period is the dashboard's stated two-year average for 2023 to 2024, except the tourism business counts, which it attributes to ABS data for the year ending June 2024. Where the dashboard prints np we have reproduced np and explained it rather than treating it as zero. We checked for profiles for Kempsey, Nambucca Valley and Bellingen using the dashboard's own area filter and found none. We have not contacted Tourism Research Australia or any of the three councils, and the paragraph about interstate travel and trip length is labelled as our reading rather than a finding.
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