The Coffs Harbour bypass enters its final year: the last bridge is under way, and 12,000 vehicles a day are about to leave the CBD

For as long as anyone driving the coast can remember, the Pacific Highway and the main street of Coffs Harbour have been the same road. Coffs is the last major town on the highway where that is still true: the freight and the holiday traffic of the entire east-coast route funnel through the middle of the city and its sets of lights. The bypass now being finished is the piece that ends that, and it is also the final piece of the upgrade of the Pacific Highway as a whole, the long project that has, town by town, taken the highway off the main streets of the north coast. The current news is that the build has reached its last structure.

What is being built now

On 1 June 2026 the state and federal governments announced that work had begun on the final bridge structure of the whole project: the southbound Pacific Highway underpass, north of Opal Boulevard at Korora. Its twin, the northbound bridge, is already operational, so this is the last new structure of the bypass to be started. Piling is under way, with columns, girders and a retaining wall to follow.

The federal Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, Catherine King, put it plainly in the announcement: Work on the final bridge has begun, and it is incredible to see how quickly the Coffs Harbour bypass is taking shape. The significance is in the word final. The bypass has been a bridge-and-tunnel build up and over the hills behind the city, and starting the last of those bridges is the milestone that puts the project into its closing stretch before it opens.

The numbers behind it

The case for the bypass is a set of numbers the governments have now confirmed, and they are worth reading together rather than one at a time.

The route runs 14 kilometres and threads three tunnels, each with two tubes carrying two lanes: the Gatelys Road tunnel at 410 metres, the Shephards Lane tunnel at 320 metres, and a third at Roberts Hill. It is designed to avoid up to 12 sets of traffic lights, which is the real mechanism behind the headline figures: a run of stop-start lights through a city is what turns a few kilometres into lost minutes, so removing the lights is what saves up to 12 minutes and lets the through-traffic, freight included, leave the CBD altogether. The NSW Minister for Roads, Jenny Aitchison, framed the payoff in those terms: The bypass will cut travel time by up to 12 minutes, allowing people to spend more time with their families and friends.

The money, stated plainly

One number deserves to be set out honestly rather than rounded away. When the funding was confirmed in November 2024, the project was funded at $2.2 billion, split $1.76 billion from the Australian Government and $440 million from the NSW Government, an 80:20 Commonwealth and state share. The cost is now stated at $2.27 billion. That is a rise of about $70 million on the funded figure, and we note it as a fact rather than smoothing it over: a project of this length and complexity has moved by roughly three per cent against its funding envelope on the figures the governments themselves publish. That gap will be worth watching against the final completion in late 2027.

Our read: the year ahead is not about the road, it is about the main street

What follows is our read, offered as opinion and built on the facts above. The interesting question about the Coffs bypass in the year ahead is not whether it opens. It will: the last bridge is under way and the opening date is late 2026. The interesting question is what Coffs does with a main street that stops being a highway.

This is the classic question every bypassed town faces, and it genuinely cuts both ways. Taking 12,000 vehicles a day out of the CBD removes the through-traffic, the noise and the freight, and it hands the city back a central frontage that has spent decades functioning as a highway rather than a high street. Whether that reclaimed frontage becomes an asset, a calmer, more walkable centre that a city can build around, or whether the town's trade simply follows the traffic out to the new interchanges, is not settled by the engineering. It is settled by what the city and its council choose to do with the space once the highway is gone. We are not going to assert which way Coffs will land, because the honest answer is that it depends on decisions not yet made. What we will say is that the bypass opening is the start of that question, not the end of one, and it is the part of this story worth following once the ribbon is cut.

We will keep reading the project pages and the ministerial releases and report the bypass against these dates, and its cost against the funded figure, as late 2026 and late 2027 approach.