Business visitors to Australia - positive news

Data Alert | Arrivals and departures of business visitors to Australia

One way to assess the extent of Australia’s involvement in international business—and business activity more generally—is to track trends in the number of people visiting the country for business purposes. This is an underappreciated metric.

In March this year, 761,240 people arrived in Australia on a short-term basis—almost exactly the same number as in March 2024.

There are six main reasons people visit Australia:

• Holiday
• Visiting friends or family
• Business
• Education
• Convention or conference
• Employment
  (plus “Other” and “Not stated”)

The chart below breaks down the number of visitors by their main purpose for travel. For each category, it shows the raw number, the percentage of the total, and the growth rate over the past 12 months.

A positive sign for the economy is that the number of visitors intending to conduct business grew by 16.1%—the second-fastest growth category. The highest growth was in education-related visits, which increased by 30.1%.

Notwithstanding the positive growth in the past year, the longer-term trend shows a decline in the proportion of visitors coming for business purposes since the early 1990s. This is evident in the trend depicted in the second chart below. (Note that if an individual visits twice, this is counted as two visits in the aggregate).