Brisbane tide times

Brisbane's tide table is read at Brisbane Bar, where the river meets Moreton Bay, about 18 kilometres downstream of the city centre. The tide there rises about 1.5 metres on an average day and close to 1.8 at springs, and every kilometre up the river moves the clock later.

Moving water sets the hour here. The Brisbane Bar tide gauge, 18.5 km from the middle of Brisbane, carries 50 harmonic constants from its record. Mean range is 1.51 m, and the form factor — diurnal constituents over semidiurnal — is 0.37, which is mixed, mainly semidiurnal water.

Tide times and heights at Brisbane

The curve answers a question the table cannot. A table gives the minute of high tide; the curve gives the hour you can actually get out — the stretch between one turn and the next that no row describes, and on a mixed, mainly semidiurnal coast that is most of the fishing day.

What the tide does at Brisbane

Up the river, Queensland's tidal planes put high tide at the Port Office ferry terminal on Edward Street, in the city, 35 minutes after Brisbane Bar; at Indooroopilly it is 1 hour 20 minutes after, and at Moggill Ferry 2 hours 21 minutes after.

Around the bay the bar's times hold closer. Redcliffe matches them to the minute and Margate within two, Shorncliffe and Sandgate run 6 minutes early, and Wellington Point 6 minutes early for high tide and 3 for low — while on the ocean side, from Cape Moreton to Snapper Rocks, tides come 1 hour 30 minutes earlier.

What the heights are measured from

Every height here is metres above Lowest Astronomical Tide, the port and chart datum Queensland has used since 1994. It is fixed — set from the tides of 1992 to 2011 and written LAT(1992) — and it is not the sea bed: it is a level placed so low that the astronomical tide alone seldom gets beneath it. For the 2026 predictions, Maritime Safety Queensland puts mean sea level at Brisbane Bar 1.347 m above that line, from gauge records for Jan 1985 to Dec 2023, and our tables stand on that same figure.

The useful consequence is that the soundings on a Queensland chart are measured from the same datum. Four metres charted with a 1.2 m tide is about 5.2 metres of water at that moment. When a low does dip below zero, Queensland's tables mark it with a minus sign, and a real sea well under zero is usually wind and pressure at work rather than the Moon.

Why the two high tides differ at Brisbane

The two high tides of a day are not twins at Brisbane. On average the higher one stands 0.21 m above the mean high water, and the gap follows the Moon's declination rather than its phase: it is widest when the Moon stands far north or south of the equator and nearly closes when the Moon crosses it, about every two weeks. On those days one of the four daily turns can shrink to a few centimetres, and the water all but stands still.

The Moon sets the rhythm and the Sun decides how hard it lands. When the two pull in line the ranges stack; when they pull across each other the range collapses. At Brisbane that puts the spring range near 1.79 m against a neap range near 1.03 m — a factor of 1.74 between the strongest and the weakest tides of the fortnight.

Both figures come from the gauge's own constants rather than from the fortnight on this page, which is why they do not move when the table is rebuilt. Maritime Safety Queensland's tidal planes give Brisbane Bar a mean high water springs of 2.22 m and a mean low water springs of 0.42 m — a published spring range of 1.8 m against 1.79 m from the constants, and that agreement is a check on the arithmetic rather than a coincidence. The same calculation at Mackay, QLD gives a mean range of 3.65 m against 1.51 m here — the same Moon and Sun acting on a different stretch of coast, with a different amount of water moving through it.

How close these numbers are to the Bureau of Meteorology

These are not the Bureau of Meteorology's predictions. The gauge's record has been analysed into 50 harmonic constants in TICON-4 — the amplitudes and phases of the periodic pulls that make up the tide here — and we synthesise the curve from them, standing it on the mean sea level Queensland publishes. Saying so is easy; the numbers that follow are the part worth reading.

Against the Bureau's own predictions, published in the Queensland Tide Tables for January 2024, all 120 high and low tides found their pair. Half fell within 4.6 minutes of the Bureau's time and nine in ten within 10.3. The worst was 16 minutes. The worst height difference was 3.7% of the day's range. Two different analyses of the same gauge sit behind those numbers — ours from TICON-4, the Bureau's from its own — and minutes rather than seconds is what that costs.

The second check is on the levels. Maritime Safety Queensland publishes the highest astronomical tide at Brisbane Bar as 2.78 m; our synthesis over the full 18.6-year lunar cycle, on the same mean sea level, gives 2.79 m, 1 cm apart.

A month of comparison is not a year, and a gauge with a big, awkward range does worse than an open coast; where that shows, the page says so, and the method behind every number on this site is written out.

When a tide table is not the right tool

A tide prediction is astronomy, and the water is weather as well. Wind and barometric pressure move the real level against the predicted one, and in a cyclone the storm tide can stand a metre or more above it — Queensland issues storm tide warnings for exactly that. The numbers here are also the gauge's water, not the water up a creek or a river, where the same tide arrives later and smaller. For navigation, the reference is the Queensland Tide Tables.

Sources. Mean sea level, tidal planes and highest astronomical tide: Maritime Safety Queensland, Department of Transport and Main Roads, Queensland Tide Tables, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Australia. The Department of Transport and Main Roads gives no warranty of any kind whether express, implied, statutory or otherwise in respect to the availability, accuracy, currency, completeness, quality or reliability of the information or that the information will be fit for any particular purpose or will not infringe any third party Intellectual Property rights. The Department of Transport and Main Roads liability for any loss, damage, cost or expense resulting from use of, or reliance on, the information is entirely excluded.

Comparison predictions: tidal prediction tables © Commonwealth of Australia, Bureau of Meteorology, as published in the Queensland Tide Tables. This product is based on Bureau of Meteorology information that has subsequently been modified. The Bureau does not necessarily support or endorse, or have any connection with, the product. In respect of that part of the information which is sourced from the Bureau, and to the maximum extent permitted by law: (i) The Bureau makes no representation and gives no warranty of any kind whether express, implied, statutory or otherwise in respect to the availability, accuracy, currency, completeness, quality, reliability or suitability of the information or that the information will be fit for any particular purpose or will not infringe any third party Intellectual Property rights; and (ii) the Bureau’s liability for any loss, damage, cost or expense resulting from use of, or reliance on, the information is entirely excluded.

Tide is the hour; it does not tell you which hour is worth taking. The reasoning behind solunar windows — and what they are worth on a coast where moving water already sets the hour — is in best fishing times. Which fishing apps carry tide tables at all, and how they say where their numbers come from, is a separate comparison.

The nearest gauges this site carries are Gold Coast, QLD (1.07 m), Mackay, QLD (3.65 m), Townsville, QLD (1.7 m) and Cairns, QLD (1.39 m), and the full list with the gauge behind each place is on the Australian tide times index.