Too much work and too few paid hours?

By Fiona Macdonald

AUTHORS

Fiona Macdonald Policy Director (Industrial and Social)
The 2025 Go Home on Time survey highlights widespread dissatisfaction with paid work hours, and employees working excessive unpaid overtime.

Widespread dissatisfaction with paid work hours, and employees working excessive unpaid overtime, are two of the key findings of the 2025 Go Home on Time Day (GHOTD) survey. The annual survey, undertaken by the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute in early September, asked 1,001 Australian workers about their paid working hours and preferences and about any unpaid overtime they worked.

The findings of the 2025 survey, marking the seventeenth Go Home on Time Day, are not dissimilar to the 2024 survey findings. A large minority of Australian workers would prefer either more or fewer paid work hours. Mostly, workers who are dissatisfied with their hours want more paid work hours (44% of all workers), while a smaller group (14%) want less paid work time. Alongside the desire for more work many employees are working several hours of unpaid overtime each week. This is the case for employees of all ages and for men and women across most industries and occupations. The 2025 GHOTD survey found, on average, employees work unpaid overtime of 3.6 hours a week, equivalent to 173 hours, or over 4.5 weeks, a year. Paid at the median wage rate this amounts to a financial cost to each worker of $7,930 per year; in total a loss of $95.78 billion.

A positive finding from the 2025 survey is that unpaid overtime among full-time employees appears to be continuing a slow decline, noted in 2024. This suggests the “Right to Disconnect” legislation, introduced for employees in large organisations in August 2024, may be having its intended impact. The legislation was only extended to small businesses in August 2025, so we might expect to see further declines in unpaid overtime in 2026. A less positive finding is that unpaid overtime is high among part-time and casual employees, many of whom are younger workers. The costs of unpaid overtime to these workers are substantial – especially when considered as a proportion of their paid work time, given their shorter paid work hours and often lower pay rates.

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Go Home on Time Day 2025: As full timers disconnect, part timers are doing more unpaid overtime