Rooms for rent in Byron Bay, from the centre outward

The first two kilometres, and then it stops

Byron is boxed in. The beach is north, the cape and the national park are east, and the flat land west of town floods. The centre measures about two kilometres across and there is very little left to build on, so most of the map you are searching sits beyond it.

Inside those two kilometres a bike beats a car. It is flat, it is small, shared paths link Belongil and Sunrise to the shops, and parking in town is paid. It is also where the fewest share houses are, and the Belongil end sits low when the rain sets in. People who get a room in the centre tend to keep it.

Every step outward, and what it trades

From there the steps are short, and each one is a trade. Widening your search by ten kilometres usually changes what you can afford more than any amount of extra budget does.

Two things decide whether a step works. The coast bus between Byron, Lennox Head and Ballina runs through the day, so check the last service before you take a room out of town. And the back roads behind Byron have no lighting, which is worth picturing before you agree to ride home along them.

• Five minutes south to Suffolk Park. Same beach, none of the main street, and you are still at work in town in ten minutes.
• Five minutes north to Sunrise Beach. Close enough to ride in, and next door to the Arts and Industry Estate, where a lot of the jobs are.
• Fifteen to twenty minutes up the hill, to Bangalow, Federal or Ewingsdale. Room to breathe, and no realistic way to live there without a car.
• Twenty minutes north to Mullumbimby, Brunswick Heads and Ocean Shores. The rent drops properly here, and so does how often you go back into Byron.
• Half an hour south to Ballina. Errands get easier, the beach gets quieter, and Byron turns into somewhere you visit.

From November the inner steps close up

Rooms tighten from November, when houses switch over to holidaymakers for summer, and they loosen again towards the end of February. The squeeze lands hardest on the inner steps, because those are the houses worth letting by the week. Arriving in December often means starting two steps further out than you had planned.

The trade for living here is worth saying plainly. A room can cost close to what one in inner Brisbane does, on hospitality wages, with a bus that comes a few times a day, and what you get back is the cape walk before work.