Right to Disconnect Laws in Australia: What Employers Need to Know

If you run a small business or startup, it’s easy to feel like you’re “always on”. Customers message after hours, team chats keep buzzing, and founders often step in wherever needed to keep things moving.

But Australia’s new right to disconnect laws change the landscape for after-hours contact at work. These reforms aren’t about stopping productive work or banning flexible arrangements - they’re about setting clearer boundaries around unreasonable out-of-hours contact, and giving employees a right to refuse that contact in certain circumstances.

For employers, the key is getting ahead of this now. With the right systems, policies, and contract terms in place, you can protect your business operations while staying compliant and avoiding disputes.

This guide breaks down what the right to disconnect laws mean, when they apply, what “unreasonable” contact looks like, and the practical steps you can take to implement them in a way that makes sense for a growing business.

What Are The Right To Disconnect Laws (And When Do They Apply)?

Australia’s right to disconnect laws create a workplace right for employees to refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact (or attempted contact) from their employer or third parties outside of working hours - unless that refusal is unreasonable.

In other words, the laws don’t make all after-hours contact illegal. Instead, they introduce a reasonableness test and a clear expectation that after-hours availability shouldn’t be treated as the default.

When Do The Right To Disconnect Laws Start?

The start date depends on whether you’re a small business employer:

• Non-small business employers: the right to disconnect applies from 26 August 2024.
• Small business employers: the right to disconnect applies from 26 August 2025.

While small businesses have a later start date, it’s worth using the lead time to get your approach right - especially if your team is already used to late-night messages, weekend check-ins, or “quick calls” outside rostered hours.

Who Does It Cover?

In practice, the right to disconnect is focused on employees (including full-time, part-time and casual employees), and it interacts with modern awards, enterprise agreements, and employment contracts.

If you regularly engage contractors, it’s still worth considering a similar boundary-setting approach in your contractor arrangements - not because the right to disconnect automatically applies to contractors (it generally doesn’t), but because expectations around responsiveness can still cause relationship and reputational issues if they’re unclear.

What Counts As “Unreasonable” After-Hours Contact For Employers?

This is usually the part business owners care about most: how do we know when contact is “unreasonable”?

The right to disconnect doesn’t create a simple rule like “no messages after 5pm”. Instead, it looks at the context. Whether after-hours contact (or an employee’s refusal) is unreasonable will depend on the circumstances.

While each situation is different, factors commonly relevant to “reasonableness” include things like:

• The reason for the contact (for example, an emergency vs a routine update).
• How the contact is made (a quick email that doesn’t require a response vs repeated calls/messages demanding immediate action).
• The employee’s role and seniority (for example, a manager with genuine after-hours responsibilities may be treated differently to a junior team member).
• Whether the employee is paid or compensated for availability (for example, an on-call arrangement or allowance).
• The employee’s working pattern (including flexible work arrangements, time zones, and whether their “hours” are clearly defined).
• Personal circumstances that may make contact particularly burdensome at certain times.

For a startup, this is a helpful way to think about it: you can still move fast, but you need a defensible business reason when you expect someone to be responsive outside their ordinary hours.

Common Scenarios That Create Risk

Here are a few patterns we often see cause problems for growing businesses:

• “Just checking” messages after hours that are treated as urgent (even when they aren’t).
• Late-night Slack/Teams messages that implicitly pressure staff to respond quickly.
• Weekend follow-ups to chase tasks that could wait until the next working day.
• Blurry on-call expectations where someone is effectively on standby without clear compensation or a defined roster.
• Global teams where one person’s workday is another person’s evening, but expectations haven’t been reset accordingly.

None of these are automatically unlawful. The legal risk builds when the pattern becomes routine, pressured, and not tied to a legitimate operational need.

How Do The Right To Disconnect Laws Affect Small Businesses Day-To-Day?

Even if you have a small team, the right to disconnect can change the way you manage operations - especially if your business relies on speed, responsiveness, or customer support.

Instead of thinking “we can’t contact staff after hours”, a better approach is: we need a clear, consistent system for when after-hours contact is necessary, and how it happens.

Rostering, Shift Changes, And Coverage

If your business runs shifts (hospitality, retail, health services, logistics, customer support), this is where you’ll feel the right to disconnect most.

Strong rostering practices reduce the need for last-minute after-hours requests, and make it clearer when someone is genuinely working vs off-duty. If you’re tightening up systems, it often helps to review your approach to employee rostering and build coverage that doesn’t rely on ad-hoc messages late at night.

Similarly, if you frequently swap or cancel shifts, make sure your team knows the rules and expectations around shift changes - because “reasonable notice” and “reasonable contact” often go hand-in-hand operationally.

On-Call Work And After-Hours Availability

Many businesses legitimately need someone on call - for example, IT support, urgent client issues, security, or incidents that can’t wait until the next business day.

If that’s your business model, you should formalise it. That means defining:

• who is on call and when;
• what counts as an “on-call” issue;
• expected response times (if any);
• how compensation works; and
• what happens if the issue can be handled during normal hours instead.

It’s also worth aligning your approach with awards/agreements and best practice guidance on on-call pay, because compensation is one of the practical factors that can support an argument that contact was reasonable.

Startups With Flexible Hours (And The “Always On” Culture)

Startups often operate with flexible schedules and high trust. That can be a huge advantage - but it can also blur boundaries fast.

If your team works flexibly, you’ll want to clarify:

• what “ordinary hours” means for each role;
• whether after-hours work is expected sometimes (and what for);
• how time off in lieu or overtime is handled (if applicable); and
• how people should communicate across time zones.

In a flexible environment, it’s not unusual for a founder to send a message after hours. The compliance question becomes: are you expecting a response, and is that expectation reasonable?

What Should You Put In Place To Comply (Without Slowing Your Business Down)?

Compliance doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does need to be intentional. A few well-chosen steps can reduce risk, set clearer expectations, and actually improve performance by cutting down burnout and confusion.

1) Update Your Employment Contracts And Role Expectations

Start by reviewing what your employment contracts say about hours, availability, overtime, and after-hours duties.

If you rely on certain roles being reachable outside standard hours (for example, an operations lead or senior manager), you should make sure that expectation is properly described, and that pay and classification support it.

For many businesses, this is a good time to refresh your Employment Contract templates so they match how your business actually operates today (not how it operated when you first hired your earliest team members).

2) Implement A Clear Workplace Policy On After-Hours Contact

A written policy is one of the simplest ways to show you’re taking the right to disconnect seriously.

Your policy can cover things like:

• what counts as working time for different teams;
• when after-hours contact may be required (and when it won’t);
• who can approve after-hours requests;
• how to raise concerns internally; and
• how emergencies are handled.

This kind of policy can sit within your broader Workplace policy set, so your team has one source of truth.

3) Build These Rules Into Your Handbook And Onboarding

Policies don’t help if nobody reads them - and in fast-moving startups, onboarding is often where expectations are set (for better or worse).

Including right-to-disconnect expectations in your onboarding, manager training, and internal guidelines helps create consistent habits. Many employers do this through a centralised Staff handbook that gets updated as the business grows.

4) Fix The Operational Triggers That Cause After-Hours Messaging

A lot of after-hours contact happens for non-legal reasons, such as:

• unclear task ownership;
• poor handovers between shifts;
• no escalation process for urgent issues;
• no “single source of truth” for rosters; or
• customer expectations that you haven’t set properly.

If you reduce the operational chaos, you reduce the legal risk.

In shift-based workplaces, it’s also worth being mindful of time between shifts so you don’t accidentally create patterns where employees feel pressured to engage when they should be resting.

5) Train Managers On “Reasonable” Communication

In most businesses, disputes don’t arise because the company has no policy - they arise because a supervisor repeatedly contacts someone after hours and treats silence as misconduct or lack of commitment.

Manager training can be as simple as:

• encouraging “schedule send” for emails;
• using message tags like “no need to respond tonight” when it’s genuinely not urgent;
• setting clear escalation pathways for emergencies; and
• documenting on-call rotations rather than informally “pinging whoever is available”.

This is also where your company culture matters. A founder can unintentionally set the expectation that “everyone should always be reachable” - even if they never say those words.

What Happens If There’s A Dispute Or Complaint?

From an employer perspective, the big risk isn’t just a one-off message. The bigger risk is an escalating conflict about boundaries, availability, performance expectations, and whether an employee is being treated fairly.

Under the right to disconnect laws, employees can raise concerns and, in some circumstances, disputes may be dealt with through workplace dispute resolution processes (including via the Fair Work Commission).

Why This Matters For Small Businesses

For small businesses and startups, disputes can be particularly disruptive because:

• you may not have an internal HR team;
• managers are often founders juggling multiple roles;
• documentation may be lighter than in larger organisations; and
• losing a single key employee can seriously affect operations.

The goal isn’t to “lawyer up” for every message. It’s to build a framework where expectations are clear, and where you can show you’ve taken reasonable steps to respect boundaries while still meeting business needs.

A Practical Risk Management Tip

If you genuinely need after-hours responsiveness, consider documenting:

• which roles have after-hours responsibilities;
• what types of issues justify contact;
• how often it happens; and
• how the employee is compensated or otherwise recognised for that availability.

This isn’t about paperwork for paperwork’s sake - it’s about avoiding misunderstandings that can become expensive and time-consuming later.

Key Takeaways

• The right to disconnect laws give employees a right to refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact outside working hours, unless that refusal is unreasonable.
• These laws don’t ban after-hours contact - they focus on whether contact and expectations are reasonable in the circumstances.
• Small business employers generally have a later start date than non-small business employers, but it’s smart to use the lead time to update policies, contracts, and systems.
• Rostering, on-call arrangements, and manager habits are the most common “pressure points” that create compliance risk.
• Clear employment contracts and workplace policies help you set expectations, protect culture, and reduce disputes as you scale.
• If your business needs genuine after-hours responsiveness, formalising on-call arrangements and compensation can help support that the contact is reasonable.

Note: This article is general information only and doesn’t constitute legal advice. Every workplace is different, and you may need advice tailored to your business, your modern award/enterprise agreement (if any), and your contracts.

If you’d like a consultation on the right to disconnect laws and how to update your employment contracts and workplace policies, you can reach us at 1800 730 617 or team@sprintlaw.com.au for a free, no-obligations chat.