The right to disconnect gives employees the right to refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact from their employer — or from third parties in connection with work — outside their working hours, unless the refusal is unreasonable. It applied to most employers from August 2024 and to small business employers from 26 August 2025.

What it is not

It is worth clearing this up first, because the shorthand version of the rule has caused a lot of unnecessary alarm.

It is not a ban on contacting employees after hours. You can still send the message. What changes is the employee’s position on the other end: they may reasonably decline to read or act on it until they are back at work, and you cannot treat them badly for that.

It is also not absolute. The refusal has to be reasonable. Whether it is depends on things like the reason for the contact, how disruptive it is, whether the employee is compensated for being available or for working outside ordinary hours, the nature of the role and level of responsibility, and the employee’s personal circumstances including caring responsibilities.

What that means in practice

A genuine emergency, a role with an on-call component that is paid as such, or a senior role where some out-of-hours contact is inherent — these are situations where refusing contact may well be unreasonable. A routine question sent at 9pm on a Friday to a part-time administrator is at the other end of the scale.

Most small businesses will never have a dispute about this, because most small businesses are not contacting staff out of hours in a way anyone objects to. The exposure sits with businesses that have drifted into an always-on habit without noticing.

Practical steps worth taking

  • Say what normal looks like. A short written statement — when the business expects responsiveness, what counts as urgent, and who to call in a real emergency — resolves most of this before it becomes an issue. Add it to your policy set.
  • Pay for availability where you need it. If a role genuinely requires out-of-hours contact, build it into the arrangement — an on-call allowance under the award, or terms in the contract that reflect it. Being compensated is one of the factors that makes a refusal unreasonable.
  • Use scheduled send. If you work at odd hours and your team does not, the simplest fix is to write when it suits you and deliver when it suits them.
  • Do not make responsiveness a performance metric. Rating someone poorly because they did not answer at night is the clearest way to turn a non-issue into a Fair Work Commission dispute.

If a disagreement arises

The first step is a conversation at the workplace. If that does not resolve it, either party can apply to the Fair Work Commission, which can make orders — including an order that the employee stop refusing contact, if the refusal is found to be unreasonable. The Commission’s role runs both ways here; it is not a one-sided mechanism.

The honest summary is that this right formalised something most reasonable employers already did. If your team knows when they are expected to be available and is paid appropriately when they are, you have already complied. If nobody has ever said it out loud, saying it out loud is the whole job.