Summary
The right to disconnect gives an employee the right to refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact from their employer outside their working hours, unless that refusal is unreasonable. It has applied to larger employers since 26 August 2024 and to small business employers — fewer than 15 employees — since 26 August 2025.
Read the sentence carefully, because the common misreading causes most of the trouble. It does not stop you contacting your staff. Sending a message after hours is not a breach. What changed is that the employee is now legally entitled to leave it until their next shift, and you cannot treat them badly for doing so.
For anyone running a roster, that is a bigger shift than it sounds. Rostering is an after-hours business by nature: someone calls in sick at 9pm, a shift needs filling by 6am, the roster changes on Sunday for a Monday start. This guide covers what "unreasonable" actually means, the three rostering habits most exposed by the change, and how to keep filling shifts without relying on a right your staff can decline to exercise.
What the law actually provides
The right to disconnect sits in the Fair Work Act 2009 as a workplace right. Three consequences follow, and the third is the one that matters most.
- An employee may refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact — or attempted contact — from the employer outside their working hours.
- The same applies to contact from a third party, where the contact relates to their work. A client, a supplier, or another location's manager messaging directly is covered.
- Because it is a workplace right, the general protections apply. Taking adverse action against someone for exercising it — cutting their shifts, passing them over, giving them the worst roster slots — is a separate and more serious contravention than the original contact ever was.
Point three is where employers get into real difficulty. The after-hours text is not the risk. Quietly rostering someone less because they stopped answering it is.
The only word that matters: unreasonable
The right protects a refusal that is reasonable. Whether a particular refusal is unreasonable is judged on the circumstances, and the Act sets out what must be taken into account:
- The reason for the contact. A genuine emergency sits very differently from a roster tweak that could wait until morning.
- How the contact is made, and how disruptive it is. A message that can be read at 7am is not a phone call at 11pm.
- Whether the employee is compensated for being available, or for working additional hours. This is the big one — see below.
- The nature of the role and the employee's level of responsibility. A venue manager and a casual runner are not in the same position.
- The employee's personal circumstances, including family or caring responsibilities.
The compensation factor deserves its own sentence, because it is the practical lever an employer actually controls. If someone is paid an on-call or availability allowance, refusing contact is much harder to justify. If they are not paid anything to be reachable, their refusal is much easier to justify. Many awards already contain on-call or recall provisions; if yours does and you have never used them, that is worth revisiting before you need it.
The three rostering habits most exposed
1. Publishing the roster late
A roster published Sunday night for a Monday morning start depends entirely on everyone reading a Sunday-night message. That was always poor practice; it is now a practice with a legal edge, because every one of those staff is entitled not to look.
Most awards set a minimum notice period for the roster and for changes to it — commonly seven days for the roster and more notice again for a change. Publishing inside that window was already a problem. The fix is not a better notification; it is an earlier roster. Our guide to creating fair rosters covers the sequencing.
2. Filling shifts by broadcasting to everyone
The standard method is a group message at 9pm: "anyone able to cover 6am tomorrow?" It works because someone always answers. The problem is that it contacts everyone, including the people for whom the message is pure intrusion, to reach the one person who says yes.
A better shape is to let staff opt in ahead of time — recording who wants extra shifts and who is available — so the after-hours message goes to three people who asked to receive it rather than thirty who did not. That is a smaller intrusion, a faster fill, and a far more defensible pattern if anyone ever complains. Recording staff availability in advance is what makes it possible.
3. Treating "always answers" as a performance signal
This is the informal one, and the most dangerous. Teams develop an unwritten sense of who is reliable, and responsiveness at 10pm quietly becomes part of it. Once that feeds into who gets the good shifts, you have adverse action on the basis of a workplace right — and it will be visible in the roster data long after anyone remembers the conversation.
If shift allocation is discretionary, be able to say what it is actually based on. "Availability, qualifications and hours already worked" is a defensible answer. "Whoever picks up" is not.
What a dispute looks like
Disputes are meant to be resolved at the workplace first — the employer and employee are expected to discuss it and try to sort it out. If that fails, either party can go to the Fair Work Commission, which can make orders: it can order an employer to stop contacting an employee outside hours, or, where it finds a refusal was unreasonable, order the employee to stop refusing.
That symmetry is worth noticing. The Commission can rule for the employer. An on-call manager, paid an allowance, who refuses to answer a genuine emergency is not protected. The right is not an entitlement to be unreachable; it is an entitlement not to be penalised for being unavailable when being unavailable is reasonable.
A workable policy, in five lines
Most businesses need something short and specific rather than a document nobody reads:
- Say what counts as urgent. Name the situations that justify a call outside hours — a safety incident, a location that cannot open. Everything else waits.
- Say which channel means urgent. If a phone call means "now" and a message means "when you're next on", people can leave the messages alone without anxiety, which is the entire point.
- Say who is on call, and pay them. Even a modest allowance, applied to a named person on a rotating roster, converts an ambiguous expectation into a paid and enforceable one.
- Set a roster publication deadline and hold it. This removes most after-hours contact at the source.
- State that not responding outside hours carries no consequence. Then make sure your shift allocation actually reflects that.
Where the system helps
Most after-hours contact exists because information is only in one person's head. Reduce that and the volume drops on its own.
In NestedClock, staff see their own roster in the app the moment it is published, so a change does not require a message to be read to take effect. Staff can record their availability and unavailability in advance, so a shift gets offered to people who already said yes rather than broadcast at everyone. Shift swaps let two staff arrange cover between themselves for a manager to approve, rather than the manager working the phones at night. And because roster changes and swaps are recorded rather than verbal, there is a record of who was offered what — which is exactly what you would want if anyone ever alleged the roster was being used as a punishment.
Where to check the detail
The provisions sit in the Fair Work Act 2009, inserted by the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Act 2024. The Fair Work Commission has published guidance on the dispute process, and modern awards now contain a right to disconnect term. Your award may also contain on-call, recall and roster-notice provisions that interact with all of this — check the current award before writing a policy.
This article is general information, not legal advice.