Right to Disconnect: Leaving the Boss’s 9pm Message Until Morning

Your boss messages at 9pm. Most of the time, you can leave it until morning, and the law backs you when you do.

That is the short answer. The longer one turns on a single word, and the word is “unreasonable”. The right to disconnect lets you ignore contact outside working hours unless ignoring it would be unreasonable, so everything that follows is about where that line falls for you, in your job and on your pay.

One thing first. This is general information, not legal advice. Your award, your agreement and your circumstances can all shift the answer, so call the Fair Work Infoline on 13 13 94 for your situation.

What the right actually is

The right is narrower than the name makes it sound, and firmer than it first looks.

According to the Fair Work Ombudsman, you can refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact, or attempted contact, outside your working hours, unless the refusal is unreasonable. The right sits in the Fair Work Act 2009, section 333M.

Three details matter.

It covers more than your boss. Contact from your employer counts. So does contact from third parties, which means clients, customers and suppliers. The client who rings your mobile on a Sunday afternoon is inside the rule as well.

Think about what that means in practice. A tradie whose customers text about quotes at night, a receptionist whose clients email on weekends, a junior whose supplier calls from another time zone. All of them have the same right, and the same test.

The channel does not matter either. Calls, emails, texts, social media and messaging apps are all covered, so if it reaches you, it counts.

And the contact itself stays lawful. This is the part people get wrong. Your boss can still send the 9pm message, and nobody breaks the law by sending it. What changes is your obligation to read it. The Ombudsman’s media release was blunt on this, quoting Anna Booth: “It’s important to remember the right to disconnect does not prohibit employers from contacting their employees, nor does it prevent employees from contacting one another, including across time zones.”

So the message will still arrive. You just do not have to open it.

Hold onto that distinction. The right does not stop anyone typing. It protects your choice not to answer, and it puts a test on that choice, the reasonableness test, which binds you and your employer alike.

Who it covers, and since when

The right arrived in two stages. The Fair Work Ombudsman gives the start dates as 26 August 2024 for employees of larger employers, and 26 August 2025 for employees of small business employers.

Small business means an employer with fewer than 15 employees at a particular time. Two counting rules sit under that. Casuals count only if they are employed on a regular and systematic basis. Employees of associated entities count too.

Between those two dates, small business staff sat outside the rule while their friends at larger employers sat inside it. That gap has closed. If you work in a small team and assumed the right was for people in big offices, check again. It reached you on 26 August 2025.

It is also national. People search for the NSW rule, the Victorian rule, the Queensland rule. There is one rule, it sits in federal law, and the state you work in does not change it.

The five things that decide “unreasonable”

There is no list of messages you are allowed to ignore. The law gives you factors instead, and the Fair Work Ombudsman sets them out:

1. Why the contact was made. An urgent problem and a note that could have waited are different things.
2. How it was made, and how disruptive it was. One email you can read at breakfast weighs differently from repeated calls through dinner.
3. Whether you are compensated. Pay for being available, or for working extra hours, goes into the balance.
4. Your role and level of responsibility. The more senior the job, the more may reasonably be expected.
5. Your personal circumstances. That includes family and caring responsibilities.

Read that list again and notice who it protects. Factor five is there for the parent doing bedtime and the person caring for a sick relative. Factor three is there so that people who are paid to be reachable stay reachable. The test works for both sides of the phone.

One rule overrides all five. If the contact is required by law, refusing it is unreasonable. That one is not up for debate.

The Ombudsman gives two worked examples. They are worth retelling, because they show the factors pulling in opposite directions.

In the first, an employee with caring responsibilities works flexible hours. Contact comes outside those hours. Refusing to respond is reasonable.

In the second, an employee is acting as a manager and is paid extra for it. Contact comes outside hours. Here, refusing could be unreasonable.

Look at what decided each one: the reason for the contact, the pay, the role and the person’s life outside work, which is why two people on the same team can get opposite answers to the same 9pm message and both be right.

So treat the right as a test applied case by case, and run it on yourself before you lean on it.

Where the right runs out

Some jobs come with the phone switched on. If you are on call, or working overtime, you can be required to respond. The Fair Work Ombudsman says so plainly in its myth-busters. The new right does not cancel a roster. Being on call is the arrangement, and answering is part of the deal.

Then there are jobs where contact outside hours comes with the territory, in senior roles or roles responsible for things that cannot wait. The role factor covers those, and it is why a blanket “I never answer after hours” may not hold up.

Your award or agreement can add detail as well. All modern awards now include a right to disconnect clause. Read yours. It may say more about how after-hours contact works in your industry than the general rule does.

The best time to learn any of this is before you take the job. If a role expects you to answer at night, find out at the interview, not after you start. It is a fair question, and it belongs in the same preparation as everything in our guide to job interview prep. Ask who contacts staff outside hours, how often on call comes around and whether that time is paid. If the answer to that last one is vague, pay attention to the vagueness.

When it goes wrong

Say you leave the message until morning and your employer objects. Or the calls keep coming and you are sure your refusal is reasonable. What then?

Start at work. The Fair Work Ombudsman’s advice is to try to sort it out in the workplace first. If you are a union member, the union can represent you in that conversation.

A dispute does not have to begin as a complaint. If the problem is expectations nobody wrote down, a calm conversation may fix it, and that conversation is the subject of the last section.

If talking fails, the Fair Work Commission can step in. It can make orders, including a stop order. That cuts both ways. The Commission can order an employee to stop unreasonably refusing contact, or order an employer to stop taking a particular action. The same factors decide which.

Then there is protection against payback. Your employer cannot take adverse action against you for exercising the right. That covers dismissal, demotion and being quietly passed over because you left a message unanswered when you were entitled to.

Keep a record while it is happening. The date, the channel, what was asked and what you did about it. A dispute over reasonableness is a dispute over facts, and notes written at the time beat a memory pieced together months later.

Where the line sits

The right to disconnect works best when nobody has to invoke it. That sounds backwards until you compare the two situations. Arguing for a right at 9pm is a fight. An expectation agreed in daylight turns into a habit, and the habit protects you without anyone having to say the word “unreasonable” out loud.

So set it now, in writing, before the next late message lands.

For managers, this is a team conversation, and it gets harder when the team holds very different ideas about phones and hours. Our piece on how to manage a multigenerational workforce covers that ground. For employees, it is a short talk with your manager, and it fits in three lines:

“After hours, I’ll be keeping work messages for the morning.”

“If something is genuinely urgent, call me and I’ll pick up.”

“Anything else, I’ll deal with first thing the next working day.”

Say it, then send it as an email so it exists in writing. Keep the reply.

That script will not fit every job. If you are on call, paid to be available or acting up into a senior role, you need a different version, and the five factors tell you how to write it. For most people on most nights, though, the default is clear.

The message can wait until morning. And if the after-hours culture where you work has you wondering whether to stay at all, start with the document that gets you out the door. Our guide to resume format in Australia is the place to begin.

Sources: Fair Work Ombudsman, Right to disconnect (https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/right-to-disconnect); Fair Work Ombudsman, Small business employees now have the right to disconnect, media release, 26 August 2025 (https://www.fairwork.gov.au/newsroom/media-releases/2025-media-releases/august-2025/20250826-right-to-disconnect-starts-for-small-business-employees-media-release); Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), section 333M