The right to disconnect, one year on: a stocktake for small employers

Small business employees have had the right to disconnect since 26 August 2025, so the useful question now is not whether you know the rule exists, but whether your after-hours habits have actually changed to match it.

Small business employees have had a right to disconnect for a year. The start date was 26 August 2025, so the anniversary has just passed. If you noted the change when it landed and then got on with running the business, this is a good week to check whether anything in the way your team works after 6pm is different from how it was in August 2024.

That check matters more than the reading did. The same discipline applied to the 1 July 2026 award increases: knowing about a change and having it operating in practice a full cycle later are two different things.

What the right actually gives an employee

It is a right to refuse, not a ban on contact. Employees "can refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact or attempted contact outside their working hours, unless their refusal is unreasonable", in the Fair Work Commission's words.

So you are not breaking a rule by sending a message at 8pm. What has changed is that silence until morning is now protected in most circumstances, and an expectation that someone monitors their phone at night is where the risk sits.

The right sits in the Fair Work Act and belongs to national system employees. Independent contractors are excluded.

Are you a small business employer for this purpose

The threshold is headcount, not full-time equivalent. A business with fewer than 15 people is a small business, counted as the total number of individuals rather than the FTE figure.

The timing rule is tied to a fixed date: if you were a small business employer on 26 August 2024, the right applies to your employees from 26 August 2025. Larger employers came in a year earlier. If you have grown past 14 people since then, worth confirming which side of the line you now sit on for other purposes too.

Where employers get "unreasonable" wrong

The common assumption is that any work-related contact is fine because it is work-related. That is not how the test reads.

Whether a refusal to respond is unreasonable depends on a set of factors that include the reason for the contact, how the contact is made and how disruptive it is, and any compensation the employee receives for being available or for working outside their hours. Those are examples from the Commission's guidance, not the complete list.

Read practically, that means the same 9pm message can land differently depending on who receives it. A message to someone on a rostered on-call arrangement who is paid an availability allowance is a very different thing from the same message to a part-time administrator who is paid for 22 hours a week and nothing else. A genuine safety or urgent operational issue is different again from a question that could have waited until Monday.

The other half of this: if a person is regularly doing real work after hours, that is time worked, and it needs to be paid and recorded like any other time worked. Right to disconnect and pay compliance are the same conversation from two ends.

The award angle

If you pay under a modern award, this obligation is not only in the Act. Modern awards were varied to include a right to disconnect term, commencing 26 August 2024 for non-small-business employers and 26 August 2025 for small business employers.

Pull up the award you use and read the clause. It sits alongside the on-call, availability and overtime provisions you already work with, and reading them together tells you more than reading either alone.

Write down what you already do informally

Most small teams already have an unwritten rule. Someone is the person you ring if the alarm goes off. Everyone knows the boss sends emails on Sunday and nobody answers them until Monday.

Getting that onto one page is the useful work here, because unwritten conventions are exactly what fall apart under pressure. Cover:

• what counts as urgent enough to contact someone outside their hours, in your business, with examples
• how urgent contact is made, given a phone call reads differently from a message in a group chat
• who, if anyone, is expected to be available outside hours, and what they receive for it
• what happens to the time if someone does end up working, so it reaches the pay run
• that reading a message on your own initiative is a choice, not an expectation

Then say it out loud to the team, because a policy nobody has heard is not much better than no policy.

If it does become a dispute

Try to resolve it at the workplace first. Where that does not work, disputes about the right to disconnect can be dealt with by the Fair Work Commission.

That is the real argument for writing something down while nothing is wrong. A disagreement about after-hours contact is usually a disagreement about what each side thought the expectation was. Having decided it in advance, in writing, with the team's input, is a far better position than working it out for the first time while someone is upset.

Sources

• https://www.fwc.gov.au/workplace-disputes/other-workplace-disputes/right-disconnect-disputes/what-right-disconnect
• https://www.fwc.gov.au/about-us/news-and-media/news/new-rules-small-businesses-26-august
• https://www.fwc.gov.au/about-us/education-and-engagement-activities/small-business-hub/what-small-business
• https://www.fwc.gov.au/hearings-decisions/major-cases/variation-modern-awards-include-right
• https://www.fairwork.gov.au/about-us/workplace-laws/annual-wage-review/annual-wage-review-2026

This guide is general information, not legal advice. Requirements change and the detail of your situation matters, so check the current guidance at fairwork.gov.au or get advice before acting on a specific case.

If writing down how after-hours contact actually works in your business is one of those jobs that keeps sliding, that is exactly the kind of thing People Management Partners sets up for small and medium businesses.