Australian staff can refuse unreasonable contact outside work hours. What the law says, what counts as unreasonable, and the roster changes that keep you clear.
12 September 2026 · 9 min read
Since August 2024 for larger employers, and August 2025 for small business, Australian employees have had a right to disconnect. It is one of the most misunderstood changes to the Fair Work Act in years, mostly because the headlines described it as a ban on contacting staff after hours. It is not that.
This is a practical read for someone who rosters people, not a legal opinion. Where it matters, check the current wording on the Fair Work Ombudsman's site or take advice — the law is newer than most of the commentary about it.
An employee may refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact from their employer outside their working hours, unless that refusal is unreasonable.
Read that twice, because almost every misreading comes from dropping the second half. The right is not a prohibition on contacting people. Nothing stops you sending a message at 9pm. What changed is that the employee is entitled to leave it until their next shift, and you cannot treat them badly for doing so.
The reasonableness test is the whole thing, and it turns on factors including:
None of those is decisive on its own. They are weighed together, which is why blanket policies — "never contact anyone after 6pm" or "everyone must answer their phone" — tend to be wrong in both directions.
It is rarely the emergency call. It is the drift.
A roster goes out on Sunday evening. Someone calls in sick at 6am and three people get texts before their shift. A group chat runs all evening because that is where the team talks. None of it feels like after-hours contact to the person sending it, because each message is small and reasonable on its own.
The pattern is what creates exposure. If your normal way of running a shift depends on people reading messages when they are not being paid, you have built a business process on something an employee is now entitled to decline.
Separate the roster from the conversation. If a shift change reaches someone as a message in a chat thread, the only way they find out is by reading the thread. If it reaches them as a change to their roster, they see it when they next look at their roster — which is a thing they do on their own time, by choice. Same information, different obligation.
Decide what is actually urgent, and say so. Most systems treat every notification identically, which trains people to check everything or nothing. If a business can mark the rare genuine emergency as urgent, it earns the right to have everything else wait.
Stop measuring responsiveness. If a manager notices who replies quickly at night, that is a problem whether or not anyone says it out loud. The right to disconnect protects the employee from adverse action for refusing contact, and "they are not a team player" is exactly the kind of reasoning that becomes evidence.
Write down the on-call arrangement, if there is one. Compensation for availability is one of the reasonableness factors. An informal expectation that someone answers the phone, with nothing paid for it and nothing written down, is the weakest position to be in.
We built this into the product rather than documenting a policy about it.
When someone ends their shift, non-urgent notifications stop reaching them. The message still posts to the channel — nothing is hidden from the team, and the conversation carries on — but the ping does not go to a person who is off the clock. When they start work again, it is there waiting. Genuinely urgent notifications still get through, because a right to disconnect is not a right to be unreachable in an emergency and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
People who never clock in are unaffected, and anyone who wants to stay reachable can opt in. That last part matters: the owner who wants their phone to buzz should be able to choose that, and an employee who does not want it should never have to ask.
Rosters are separate from chat for the reason above. A published roster is information you can go and look at, not a message that arrives.
It is not a reason to stop communicating. The businesses that respond to this by banning after-hours messages entirely tend to reinvent the problem somewhere worse — a manager who cannot flag a genuine issue at 7pm will flag it at 7am to a person who then has no time to act on it.
It is also not a compliance product you can buy. The law is about the relationship between an employer and an employee. Software can remove the accidental pressure — the 9pm ping for a roster change that could have waited — but it cannot make an unreasonable expectation reasonable.
You can still contact your team. They can still choose not to answer until they are back at work. The question a tribunal would ask is whether your contact was reasonable in the circumstances, and the best defence is a business that does not routinely need people to read messages they are not being paid to read.
If your roster only works because everyone checks their phone at night, fix the roster.