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Official sources
Australian tide predictions are computed by a single organisation and republished by everyone else. Knowing that makes finding the right official table much simpler.
01 · The structure
Australia's official tide predictions are produced by the tidal unit of the Bureau of Meteorology. The Bureau describes itself as the primary provider of tide tables, tidal streams and tidal constituents for the Australian Hydrographic Office.
The Australian Hydrographic Office publishes the Australian National Tide Tables, the authoritative national volume, which covers more than 90 primary (standard) ports and over 700 secondary ports across Australia and neighbouring waters.
State maritime agencies and port authorities then republish those predictions in their own formats. No Australian state computes its own tide predictions. When a state tide table and the Bureau's table disagree, the usual explanation is a different edition or a different datum, not a different calculation.
This has a practical consequence: if your state agency does not publish a table for your location, going to the Bureau directly will usually get you the same numbers from the original source.
02 · Jurisdictions
Coverage is genuinely uneven. Three jurisdictions publish nothing of their own at all.
The most complete state offering in the country. Annual tide tables covering 32 standard ports and 48 secondary locations, plus published tidal planes and machine-readable open data. Heights are given above the Queensland Port Datum, which is Lowest Astronomical Tide on the 1992 determination. Tide tables · Tidal planes
Both publish, and both are more limited than they look. The Manly Hydraulics Laboratory tide charts are built on a single prediction station in Sydney Harbour, with time corrections for around 140 estuarine and river locations rather than independent predictions for each. For ocean locations outside Sydney, the Bureau's own NSW tables are the better source. MHL tide charts
The Victorian Tide Tables publication is no longer available at its long-cited address, and the replacement Ports Victoria page carries live wave and weather conditions rather than tide predictions. It refers users to the Bureau of Meteorology, as does Gippsland Ports for the Gippsland Lakes. Use the Bureau's Victorian tables.
Publishes annual tide prediction PDFs by location. Note that these are Bureau of Meteorology documents with a departmental cover page, and the two carry different conditions of use. Tide predictions by location
South Australia publishes no tide predictions of its own and directs people to the Bureau of Meteorology or to purchasing the Australian National Tide Tables. The Bureau's South Australian page also carries dodge tide information, which is specific to the SA gulfs and worth reading if you boat there.
An honest passthrough. The NT publishes daily, hourly and monthly PDFs for five locations (Darwin, Centre Island, Charles Point Patches, Melville Bay and Milner Bay) and states plainly that the predictions are supplied by the Bureau of Meteorology.
TasPorts does not publish tide tables. Use the Bureau's Tasmanian tables, which cover Hobart, Burnie, Devonport, Low Head, Stanley and Spring Bay.
The Bureau's own tide tables index is organised by state and year, and typically carries the current and following year. Its interactive map covers several hundred Australian stations, though it is an older map interface and can be awkward on a phone.
03 · Cost and format
That last point is the reason independent Australian tide sites are rarer than you might expect, and the reason many of the ones that exist are extrapolating from a distant reference port rather than computing a real prediction for the place named at the top of the page.
04 · The distinction that matters
A standard port (also called a primary port) has its own tide gauge record, its own harmonic analysis and its own independently computed prediction. The numbers are for that place.
A secondary port does not. Its predictions are derived from a standard port by applying time and height differences. Those differences are themselves derived from a shorter observation record, and they are usually constants rather than functions of the tide's size or the season.
So a secondary port prediction inherits every error in the standard port's prediction and adds its own. That is entirely normal and the official tables are explicit about it. It becomes a problem only when a third-party site presents a secondary port prediction without saying that is what it is, which is common.
How to tell: the official tables list secondary ports with their reference port and the corrections applied. If a site shows you a tide table for a small creek or a boat ramp and does not name a reference port anywhere, you are almost certainly looking at an undisclosed derivation, and possibly at a straight copy of a standard port's numbers.
A useful sanity check is to compare two nearby places on the same site. If a boat ramp several kilometres up an estuary shows tide times identical to the minute with the open coast, the site is not modelling the estuary at all.
05 · Our position
Plainly: we do not currently publish tide predictions for any Australian location, because we do not hold the rights to.
Australian tide predictions are Crown copyright. The Bureau's annual tide table pages carry conditions of use that permit creating new products from the predictions with the right attribution and disclaimer. Other Bureau surfaces carry no such stated conditions, in which case the Bureau's default terms apply and those prohibit commercial supply and expressly disallow scraping. Some state authorities permit republication and some prohibit it in writing.
We would rather say this than quietly publish a table and hope nobody checks. If and when we do publish predictions, every page will name its source, its source station, its datum and its epoch, and will carry the attribution its licence requires. Until then, the links on this page go where the real numbers are.
06 · Obligation
Use the Australian National Tide Tables or the official product for your waters, not this site and not any other independent site, when:
Independent sites, including this one, are for orientation and planning. That is a genuine use and we take it seriously, but it is not the same thing as an official prediction and it should never be substituted for one.
Next: how to read a tide chart, or what the height is measured from.