Your boss can still text you at 9pm. You just may not have to answer

Every Australian employee, including those at the smallest businesses, now has a legal right to disconnect. What the law actually protects is narrower than most people think.

There is a certain nostalgia to the idea of pre-smartphone work. You did your job without Teams or a buzzing phone, and when the day was done you left and could not be reached until morning. For a growing share of workers that boundary has quietly eroded, as email and messaging apps followed everyone home.

A year ago this week, Australia pushed back. Since 26 August 2025, every employee in the country, including those at the smallest businesses, has had a legal right to switch off. The right first applied to businesses with 15 or more staff from 26 August 2024, and reached small businesses, those with fewer than 15 employees, a year later.

The popular version of the law is that your boss can no longer contact you after hours. That is not what it says. Employers are free to call, email or text at 9pm. What the law gives employees is the right to "refuse to monitor, read or reply to contact (or attempted contact) outside their working hours, unless doing so is unreasonable," according to the Fair Work Ombudsman.

That last clause does most of the work. Whether a refusal is unreasonable depends on five factors set out in the Fair Work Act: the reason for the contact, how it is made and how disruptive it is, whether the employee is paid for being available, their role and level of responsibility, and their personal circumstances, including caring duties. A refusal is always unreasonable if the contact is required by law.

In practice that means a senior manager on a higher salary who is paid to be on call is likely to have a weaker claim than a junior employee messaged about something that can wait until morning.

Enforcement is soft by design. Disputes are meant to be resolved in the workplace first. If that fails, either side can go to the Fair Work Commission, which can issue a stop order directing an employer to stop unreasonable contact, or an employee to stop unreasonably refusing it. The right is also a workplace right under the general protections laws, which means an employer cannot sack, demote or overlook someone for exercising it.

When the right reached small business, Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth said larger workplaces should already have set expectations about out-of-hours contact, and that "now it's time for small business employers and employees to have that conversation."

So far, few people have tested it. "The anticipated wave of litigation surrounding the right to disconnect has not materialised," Shakira Hanns of Coulter Legal wrote in September 2025.

The right to disconnect is less a shield than a bargaining chip. It does not stop after-hours messages, and there is no penalty simply for sending them. What it does is protect you from being punished for ignoring a message that could reasonably wait. Its real value lies in the conversation it forces about what "on" means in each role, and whether that is reflected in pay. We expect the law to change workplace habits slowly, through contracts and job ads that spell out availability, rather than through Commission cases. If you are in finance, law or media and routinely answer emails at midnight, raise it at your next contract negotiation. That is where this law has the most leverage.