Australian workers are being shortchanged $95.8 billion a year in unpaid overtime   

New Daily
Nov 21, 2025

A new report finds the average Australian worker did more than three and a half hours of extra work, for no extra pay.


If Australian workers were paid for the hours of overtime they currently work for free, they would be more than $300 a fortnight better off, research has found.

That would put an extra $8000 a year into the bank account of the average Australian worker as the cost-of-living crisis drags on.


To mark the 17th year of Go Home on Time Day, the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work released its latest data on unpaid overtime.

The report found that the average Australian worker did more than 3½ hours of extra work every week, for no extra pay.

And as full-time employees and their bosses adapt to new right to disconnect laws, the burden of unpaid overtime is falling more on part-time and casual workers.

That means the lowest paid workers in the Australian economy – part-time and casual employees aged 18 to 24 – are also those doing the most unpaid overtime, an average of 4.7 hours a week.

All up, Australian workers are being shortchanged $95.8 billion a year in lost wages.   


Centre for Future Work director and report author Fiona Macdonald believes the right to disconnect laws are working – at least for full-time employees, as workers and bosses get used to the new regime.

Under the legislation, workers are legally entitled to refuse out-of-hours requests from their employers where it is reasonable to do so.

“It’s a good first step,” Macdonald said.


“Australians have been giving their bosses so many free hours for so many years, we were never going to see the level of unpaid overtime suddenly plummet.” 

But the same can’t be said for part-time and casual workers, who are doing more hours of unpaid work than in previous years.

“This is the first time we have seen rates of unpaid overtime for part-time workers almost as high as full-time workers,” Macdonald said.

“The right to disconnect is less effective for part-time workers and casuals because they are simply not given enough paid hours to do their jobs.

“Young people who are already on the lowest incomes are bearing the brunt of this trend towards squeezing part-timers.”

The 2025 Go Home on Time Day report also looked at the personal impact of unpaid overtime; 42 per cent of workers said it made them physically tired and 37 per cent said they were left feeling mentally drained.

Some 35 per cent said they felt stress or anxiety, 31 per cent said it impacted their personal lives and 23 per cent said they experienced disrupted sleep.

“The toll of unpaid overtime on workers and their families is both social and financial,” the report states.   

“More must be done to address this problem and more must be done to ensure workers can attain fair and predictable working time schedules and have adequate and stable incomes from work.”

Ironically, the report also found that while many Australian workers are doing so many unpaid hours, 30 per cent said they wanted more paid hours, predominantly to deal with ongoing cost-of-living pressures.

“These preferences are expressed by many workers of all ages, in all forms of employment, and in all industries and occupations,” the report found.

The 2025 Go Home on Time Day report details the findings of a survey of 1001 employed Australians, conducted between September 5-11.

whiteknight wrote Today at 12:43pm:


Company greed?

Or competition destroying company profits?

And people frightened of losing their jobs...