Right to Disconnect: Can Your Boss Contact You After Hours?

About the right to disconnect, introduced by the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Act 2024, gives employees the right to refuse to monitor, read, or respond to contact (or attempted contact) from their employer or a third party related to their work outside of their working hours, unless the refusal is unreasonable. The right is codified in section 333M of the Fair Work Act 2009. It commenced on 26 August 2024 for employees of non-small-business employers (those with 15 or more employees on 26 August 2024) and extended to employees of small businesses (fewer than 15 employees) from 26 August 2025.

Real talk: As of today, the right to disconnect applies to all employees in the national workplace relations system, regardless of employer size. Critically, the right does not prohibit your employer from contacting you outside of working hours.

Your boss can still send you an email at 10pm or a text on Saturday morning. What the law protects is your right not to read, respond to, or engage with that contact until your next working period. The distinction is between contact (which is allowed) and the obligation to respond (which you can refuse if the refusal is reasonable). This isn't an absolute right — reasonableness is assessed case by case, and there are circumstances where a refusal to respond will not be protected.

Your manager sends a text at 2pm on Sunday asking you to prepare an agenda for Monday's 9am team meeting. You see the notification but do not respond. Under the right to disconnect, your refusal to respond until Monday morning is almost certainly reasonable.

Sunday is outside your ordinary working hours (assuming you're a Monday-to-Friday worker), the request isn't urgent — it relates to a scheduled meeting the following day, and you haven't been engaged or paid to work on Sundays. You're within your rights to see the message, note it, and deal with it when you start work on Monday.

If your manager raises the issue, you can point to section 333M and explain that you chose not to respond outside working hours. However, the practical reality matters too. If your manager routinely sends Sunday messages and expects Monday-morning action, the real question is whether the request is unreasonable — not whether you saw the message. A single text about a non-urgent matter is squarely within the right to disconnect.

Repeated Sunday texts with escalating urgency or consequences for not responding may constitute an attempt to undermine your right, which you could raise with the FWC.

A client sends you an email at 9pm on a Tuesday marked 'urgent' requesting changes to a project by 9am the next morning. The right to disconnect covers contact from third parties (including clients) that relates to your work, not just contact from your employer directly. You aren't obligated to monitor your work email at 9pm, and your refusal to respond until the morning is likely reasonable — you're outside working hours, and the client's definition of 'urgent' doesn't create a legal obligation for you.

Here's what you need to know: however, context matters. If your role involves client-facing responsibilities and your employment contract includes an expectation of out-of-hours availability for client matters (with corresponding compensation, such as a higher salary, an on-call allowance, or overtime payments), then refusing to respond may be less reasonable. No exceptions.

The FWC considers whether you're compensated for being available — if you're paid a flat salary with no additional compensation for after-hours contact, the balance tips strongly in favour of your right to refuse. If your employer pressures you to respond to after-hours client emails without additional compensation, this is a pattern you can raise through your employer's internal processes or, if unresolved, with the FWC. Document the frequency and nature of the contacts — a clear pattern strengthens your position.

Your team has a WhatsApp group that's active well outside business hours — colleagues posting memes at 7pm, your manager sharing updates at 9pm, weekend discussions about the upcoming week. Do you've to stay in the group? Can you mute it? The right to disconnect covers all forms of contact, including instant messaging apps, social media, and group chats. You have the right to mute the WhatsApp group outside working hours and not engage with any messages until your next working period.

You aren't required to leave the group entirely, but you are not required to monitor it either. If your manager expects you to read and respond to WhatsApp messages outside working hours, that expectation is subject to the reasonableness test. Worth checking.

Informal, social messages (memes, casual chat) don't create a work obligation. But if your manager uses the group to assign tasks, change rosters, or communicate time-sensitive work information outside working hours, you have a reasonable basis to request that work-related communications be sent during working hours or through formal channels that you check during work time. A practical approach is to set your WhatsApp notifications to 'mute' for the group outside working hours and address any work-related messages when you're next on duty. If your manager challenges this, the law is on your side — provided you aren't being compensated for after-hours availability.

If you're rostered on-call and an emergency arises, the right to disconnect does not protect a refusal to respond. Being on-call means you have agreed (and are typically compensated, through on-call allowances under your award or enterprise agreement) to be available and respond to contact during specified periods. This isn't 'outside working hours' in the relevant sense — on-call time is a form of working time for which you are compensated.

Similarly, genuine emergencies may make a refusal to respond unreasonable even if you aren't on-call. Section 333M(4) lists factors the FWC considers when assessing reasonableness, including the reason for the contact, how the contact is made, the level of disruption to you, the extent to which you're compensated for being available, the nature of your role, and your personal circumstances (including family or caring responsibilities).

A genuine operational emergency — a safety incident, a system failure affecting critical services, a natural disaster — where your specific expertise is needed and can't wait until the next business day may justify after-hours contact even to employees not on-call. But 'my boss forgot to attach a file to an email' or 'we need to adjust next week's marketing budget' are not emergencies. The threshold for overriding the right to disconnect is high, and employers cannot manufacture urgency to circumvent the right.

When the right to disconnect first commenced on 26 August 2024, it applied only to employees of non-small-business employers — those with 15 or more employees. Small business employees had to wait 12 months. From 26 August 2025, the right to disconnect extended to employees of small businesses (fewer than 15 employees), meaning it now covers all employees in the national workplace relations system.

For small business employers, the extension requires adjusting workplace practices and expectations. Many small businesses operate with less formal boundaries between work and personal time — owners and managers are often accessible around the clock and may expect the same of their small team.

The law does not change the culture overnight, but it does give small business employees a legal right to set boundaries. Small business employers should review their after-hours contact practices and consider whether they are compensating employees appropriately for any expectation of out-of-hours availability. If you expect employees to respond to calls or messages outside their rostered hours, you need to either compensate them (through an on-call allowance, overtime, or a higher base salary that explicitly accounts for out-of-hours contact) or accept that they may reasonably refuse to respond. The Fair Work Ombudsman has published specific guidance for small businesses at fairwork.gov.au to help navigate the new obligation.

If your employer repeatedly contacts you outside working hours and expects a response, or penalises you for not responding, you've several options.

Let's break this down. A clear, professional conversation may resolve the issue.

If your employer repeatedly contacts you outside working hours and expects a response, or penalises you for not responding, you've several options.

• raise it directly with your employer or manager — explain that you are exercising your right under section 333M of the Fair Work Act and ask that non-urgent communications be sent during working hours or held until the next business day. Many managers aren't deliberately violating the right — they are operating on pre-existing habits
• if direct discussion doesn't work, raise a formal complaint through your employer's internal grievance or dispute resolution process
• either you or your employer can apply to the FWC for a 'stop order' under section 333N. The FWC can order the employer to stop requiring the employee to respond to after-hours contact, or it can order the employee to respond where the refusal is found to be unreasonable. If the FWC makes a stop order and the employer contravenes it, penalties apply — up to $18,780 per contravention for an individual and $93,900 for a corporation

Document every instance of after-hours contact and any consequences you experienced for not responding — this creates a record if the matter escalates.

Fourth, if your employer takes adverse action against you (demotion, reduced hours, dismissal, or other detriment) because you exercised your right to disconnect, this may constitute a general protections breach under Part 3-1 of the Fair Work Act, carrying penalties of up to $93,900 per contravention for a corporation. Keep all evidence — text messages, emails, call logs, and any communications where your manager expressed displeasure at your unavailability.