First, what the number is, because it is easy to misread. A passenger movement is not a passenger. BITRE counts arrivals and departures separately, so somebody who flies into Ballina and later flies out has generated two movements at that airport. The figures below are movements throughout, which is how the Commonwealth reports them and how airports are compared with each other.
The three airports
| Airport | 2018-19 | 2022-23 | 2024-25 | Rank | vs 2018-19 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gold Coast | 5,446,002 | 5,393,395 | 5,374,010 | 6 | -1.3% |
| Ballina Byron | 534,073 | 632,612 | 612,073 | 18 | +14.6% |
| Coffs Harbour | 396,392 | 283,444 | 250,298 | 28 | -36.9% |
Before COVID, Ballina and Coffs Harbour were comparable airports: 534,073 movements against 396,392, both regional gateways on the same coastline. In 2024-25 Ballina is 2.4 times the size of Coffs Harbour. That gap opened in five years.
The rank tells a second story
Ballina's best national ranking was not in its biggest year. It was 12th, in 2020-21, when the airport handled 588,747 movements. That was the first full COVID financial year, when international travel had stopped and the airports that normally sit above Ballina in the table were mostly empty. A domestic leisure airport rises up a national ranking when nobody is flying overseas, without doing anything differently.
Since then the rank has slid back: 16th, 16th, 17th, and 18th in 2024-25, which is where Ballina sat in 2017-18. That is what recovery elsewhere looks like from the point of view of a regional airport, and it is arithmetic rather than decline.
The absolute number is a different matter
Ballina's highest year on record is 2022-23, at 632,612 movements. It has fallen in each of the two years since, to 620,258 and then 612,073, a total of 3.2 per cent off the peak. That is a real decline in absolute terms and it is not explained by other airports recovering.
It is also small, and it sits on top of a large gain. The airport is still carrying 14.6 per cent more than in 2018-19, in a period when the Gold Coast has not got back to its own pre-COVID figure. Two years of small declines from a record is a different thing from a downward trend, and on two data points we are not going to call it one.
What this data cannot tell you, and one thing worth knowing
It cannot tell you why any of this happened. BITRE publishes movements by airport and nothing about routes, airlines, fares or who was travelling, so every explanation you might reach for, the 2022 floods, the Byron visitor economy, airline capacity decisions, is outside this dataset. We are not offering one.
One thing in BITRE's own notes is worth putting beside the years in question, without drawing a conclusion from it. Bonza began flying on 31 January 2023 and ceased operations in April 2024. That airline existed for almost exactly the window between Ballina's record year and the second of its two declines. Whether it served these airports, and how much traffic it carried if it did, is not in this file. It is the first thing anyone examining these numbers properly would need to establish.
BITRE also notes that services in 2020-21 and 2021-22 were severely affected by the pandemic, which is why the comparisons above use 2018-19 as the pre-COVID reference rather than either of those years.
What to watch
The 2025-26 edition, which will show whether two years of decline becomes three. The Coffs Harbour figure, which has fallen further than anything else on this coast and is the more urgent question of the two. And the monthly airport data BITRE publishes alongside the annual file, which would let anyone test the Bonza window directly rather than noting it.
Sources
- Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics, Airport traffic data, financial years 1985-86 to 2024-25 (xlsx, downloaded and read 25 August 2026): every passenger movement figure and every rank above, for Ballina, Gold Coast and Coffs Harbour, from the Airport Passengers sheet; and, from the Explanatory Notes sheet, the definition of a passenger movement as the sum of arrivals and departures, the statement that each domestic passenger generates two movements, the note that rank is shown only for airports with 50,000 or more movements a year, the note that services in 2020-21 and 2021-22 were severely affected by COVID-19, and the note that Bonza commenced operations on 31 January 2023 and ceased in April 2024.
- Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics, Airport traffic data (index page, read 25 August 2026): that the financial-year file above is the current edition, and the monthly and calendar-year files referred to at the end.
How we did this
All figures come from one spreadsheet published by BITRE and read directly. The percentage changes are ours: 612,073 against 534,073 is a rise of 14.6 per cent, 5,374,010 against 5,446,002 is a fall of 1.3 per cent, and 250,298 against 396,392 is a fall of 36.9 per cent, each rounded to one decimal place. The 2.4 times comparison is 612,073 divided by 250,298. The 3.2 per cent is 612,073 against the 2022-23 figure of 632,612. Ranks are BITRE's own column and are ranks among the airports that meet its reporting threshold, not among all Australian airports. We use 2018-19 as the pre-COVID reference because BITRE's notes record 2020-21 and 2021-22 as severely affected, and 2019-20 contains the start of the pandemic. We have not sought comment from any airport or airline, and we have deliberately offered no explanation for any of the movements described, because this dataset does not contain one.