What is PaddockMate?
A free, community-driven map of employers eligible for the “88 days of farm work” in Australia, built by backpackers, for backpackers.
🗺️ View the mapRegion guides
The road-trip notebook for each state: where the work is, when, and the pitfalls to know.
Tap a state to open its road-trip guide 👇
Our story
PaddockMate is two engineers who dropped everything for the Working Holiday Visa in Australia. We showed up just like you: backpack on, a sketchy van, and one obsession — finding a farm to work at. The catch? For a 2nd visa you need 88 days of specified work (6 months for the 3rd), on a farm, a station, a mine or a construction site, often stuck hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town.
And finding a reliable employer who's genuinely eligible and still hiring? Good luck. You're left with word of mouth, Facebook groups drowning in messages, and sites stuck in the past with data that's never up to date. We figured we could do better — so we built it.
Our mission
To simplify backpackers' daily life in Australia. One question haunts everyone when they arrive: “where can I actually work, and does it count toward my visa?” PaddockMate answers with a clear, free map built around a community — not an advertising algorithm.
What you can do on PaddockMate
Interactive map
Nearly 2,000 employers eligible for specified work, geolocated and filterable by industry and region.
Day counter
Track your 88 days (2nd visa) and your 6 months (3rd visa) separately, period by period, without juggling a spreadsheet.
Harvest calendar
See at a glance which states are in full harvest this month, so you can target your search where they're actually hiring.
Wildlife, camping & accommodation
Handy layers for life on the road: Australian wildlife-spotting locations, free campsites, hotels and hostels.
Verified reviews
Rate and comment on employers you've worked for, on precise criteria — not just stars in a vacuum.
Free access
No subscription, no paid listings. A free account is all you need to see full contact details and contribute.
Why your reviews matter so much
PaddockMate's core data (business name, industry, eligibility for specified work) comes from public Australian registries — solid, but frozen in time: an employer can close, change owners, or stop hiring overnight.
What makes PaddockMate truly alive is you. Every review, every rating, every corrected detail enriches and refreshes the database for the next backpacker searching for exactly what you're searching for today. There's no sales team behind any of this — just a community helping each other, the way it already happens spontaneously in Facebook groups, but centralised and organised.
The more the community contributes, the fresher and more reliable the data stays for everyone — and the more PaddockMate can stay accessible, without needing to sell access to the information.
Already worked somewhere? Take two minutes to leave a review — the next backpacker who turns up at that farm in the middle of the Outback will thank you for it.