Jobs in Cairns — hospitality work for backpackers

Last updated: 2026-08-31

Cairns has 1,157 venues on the get88 list, each with an email address that accepts mail. The biggest venue type is cafés & restaurants at 434.

Cairns hiring follows the dry season: venues staff up through April and May, and demand peaks July to September — Ironman in June and the Cairns Festival in August pull extra casual shifts. Christmas is the quiet season here, not the busy one. Rental vacancy sits around 1%, so book a bed before you fly. Gilligan's runs a job club, and long-stayers use the hostels with weekly rates.

If you are sitting in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane on a working-holiday visa, refreshing a job board and hearing nothing back, that number is the size of the pool in one regional town. You can write to it from where you are. See how Cairns compares to the rest of Queensland.

What kind of venues are in Cairns?

Uncategorised means the venue is on the list and can be written to, but nobody has recorded what kind of venue it is yet.

The Cairns venue table

This is the shape of the table, not the table. Names and email addresses are held back until you have an account, so there is nothing here for a scraper to take.

Showing 25 rows of 1,157 venues in Cairns. The blurred cells are placeholders, not real records — no venue name or email address is in this page. The names and addresses sit on the full roster, which comes with a paid account.

Before you book the bus

Hospitality, tourism and housekeeping roles only — no farm, construction, mining or fishing work is on the list. How the sending works is on the how it works page, and which postcodes and which work count is in the specified work guide.

88 days in Cairns, answered

Nearby: Port Douglas, Mission Beach, Atherton

get88 is a job-application tool, not migration advice. Whether a job in Cairns counts toward your visa is decided by the Department of Home Affairs, and your postcode is what decides it — check the official specified-work pages for the 417 and 462 visas directly.