Excessive unpaid overtime: What exactly is the problem and how will it be solved?

This week the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute published the annual Go Home On Time Day survey findings. The results suggest that unpaid overtime hours worked full-time employees are on a continuing downward trajectory. This is a very positive finding as Australian workers have had some very high rates of unpaid overtime, including in comparison with workers in other countries.

However, things are not looking so good for part-time employees who, according to our survey findings, are now working almost as many hours of unpaid overtime as full-timers (3.7 compared with 3.8 hours a week). This is despite the fact that part-time employees’ weekly paid work hours (under 24 hours a week) are far fewer than those of full-time employees (37 hours a week).

The Go Home on Time Day survey found that, for every seven hours of paid work, part-time employees are working another hour for their employers for free.

So, why is unpaid overtime so high for part-time employees?

Many different factors are likely to contribute to excessive unpaid overtime among part-timers. Low awareness of the Right to Disconnect legislation, introduced a year ago for large organisations but only coming in to effect for small businesses in August 2025, is one possible factor. Many part-time employees are in small businesses and many of them are younger workers who may have less knowledge of their work rights and be in more insecure work.

Another thing to take account of is that the Right to Disconnect laws are just not designed to address all the practices that cause unpaid overtime for large numbers of part-time employees.

The Right to Disconnect legislation is designed to tackle the unpaid overtime that spills into workers’ personal time as a result of the constant digital connection many employees have to their workplaces.  Under the law employees have the right to refuse contact from their workplaces outside their scheduled work hours, unless doing so is unreasonable.

In many circumstances it may be very difficult for an employee to seek to exercise their rights under the Right to Disconnect law as a solution to excessive unpaid overtime.

Part-time roles in which unpaid overtime is likely to be prevalent include, for example:

• hospitality and retails jobs in which workers start and/or finish 15 minutes late every shift because they need to be prepared for customers when the doors open and/or can’t clean up until after customers are gone.
• care and support workers working in the community or in clients’ homes whose jobs don’t have time factored in for the regular administrative work or unpredictable events they often have to deal with on a daily basis;
• university tutors who are not paid for all the time it takes to mark papers; and
• nurses whose paid work time is not enough time for patient handovers at the end of the shift.

The Right to Disconnect can make a difference to reducing unpaid overtime, and this years’ survey suggests it is doing that for full-time employees. In 2025, full-time employees’ unpaid overtime is 3.8 hours a week, on average, a little less than the 4.1 hours seen in 2024. Only two years ago, full-time employees were working 6.2 hours unpaid overtime a week.  Today, cost of living pressures have eased somewhat, but are still high, and unemployment has been climbing slowly and a substantial minority of workers would prefer to have more paid work hours. In this context, reductions in unpaid overtime might not be expected Yet, the lower levels of unpaid overtime seen in 2024 are holding.

Yet, the Right to Disconnect is not the complete solution to all excessive unpaid overtime. Greater transparency, including through requirements for employer record keeping on unpaid overtime may be needed in many industries. Changes to working time and overtime clauses to ensure regular overtime is paid may also be part of the solution. Rostering arrangements that squeeze all downtime out of employees’ paid work shifts must be tackled.