Australian employees are working more than four-and-a-half full-time weeks’ worth of unpaid overtime a year.
New findings from the Australia Institute also show that, for the first time, part-time employees are working almost as many hours of unpaid overtime as full-time workers.
Fiona Macdonald, director of the institute’s Centre for Future Work, warned the new right to disconnect appears to be “less effective” for part-time and casual workers who are “not given enough paid hours to do their jobs.”
Legal rights
In 2024, a Senate committee found some workers were being driven to exhaustion by pressure to be available outside their usual hours.
In response, the Federal Government passed a law giving workers the explicit legal right to “refuse to monitor, read, or respond to” work-related contact outside of hours.
In August 2024, the law came into effect for large businesses. This August, the new right applied to employees of small businesses.
Report
Macdonald calculated the average working time, both paid and unpaid, across Australia, with a survey of 1,001 workers in September 2025.
Across the workforce, unpaid overtime amounts to almost 173 hours per year, per worker.
Your contribution ensures The Daily Aus can continue doing the work you love.
I want to give $10 monthly to help TDA keep doing the news.
Your details:
Full-time employees average 3.8 hours of unpaid labour each week, while part-time employees are close behind on 3.7 hours.
People between the ages of 18 and 24 reported doing the most unpaid overtime, averaging 4.7 hours a week.
At median (middle, considered most-representative) wage rates, the average worker is missing out about $305 a fortnight.
This adds up to $7,930 a year individually and $95.8 billion a year collectively.
The total number of unpaid overtime hours this year and last year were both lower than the 5.4 hours reported in the 2023 survey.
Comments
In a statement, Macdonald said she hadn’t expected the level of unpaid overtime to “suddenly plummet” following the introduction of the right to disconnect, and described the declining rates as “a good first step”.
However, she raised concerns that young people are “bearing the brunt of this trend towards squeezing part-timers”.
“The cost-of-living crisis isn’t over... workers should be paid for every single hour they work,” Macdonald said.
