Right to disconnect policy in the UK

The legal position: no right to disconnect in UK law

UK law contains no right to disconnect: no Act of Parliament or regulation stops an employer from emailing, calling or messaging staff outside their working hours, and none gives staff a right to ignore work contact as such. What exists is a government commitment that has not yet become a rule. In October 2024 the government’s Next steps to make work pay said it would deliver some reforms “through other means, such as taking forward the Right to Switch Off through a statutory Code of Practice”.

During the Employment Rights Bill’s passage, the House of Lords debated an amendment to create a statutory right to disconnect. Replying for the government on 3 June 2025, Lord Leong said “We are committed to delivering the right to switch off” but that “we will introduce the right to switch off only once we have consulted thoroughly with workers, businesses, trade unions and other key stakeholders” (Hansard, Lords, 3 June 2025), and the amendment was withdrawn. Lord Leong pointed instead to the Bill’s “reforms to flexible working that will make it easier to strike a better work/life balance”, which the government’s timeline now lists for 2027. The Bill became the Employment Rights Act 2025 in December 2025 without one.

Since then the position has not moved into law. In February 2026 the government answered a House of Lords committee that had welcomed a code rather than legislation. Its response to the Home-based Working Committee agreed that employers “must be able to contact employees where there is a legitimate need to do so” and said “The government will continue to progress policies aimed at alleviating stress in the workplace”, without mentioning a code of practice or giving any date for one. The government’s Plan to Make Work Pay and Employment Rights Act timeline, updated on 25 September 2026, lists measures into 2027 and does not include a right to switch off. If a code is announced, check the gov.uk page before relying on this paragraph.

So an out-of-hours messaging policy in the UK today is a voluntary policy. It can still be binding on the organisation once adopted, and it sits on top of law that already applies.

The law that already applies to messages after work hours

Three sets of rules already reach the message sent at nine in the evening.

• Working time. The Working Time Regulations 1998 define working time as “any period during which he is working, at his employer’s disposal and carrying out his activity or duties”. Acas, in Being on call, says on-call time “can count as working time if the worker is doing work that their employer requires them to do under their employment contract”, and that on-call workers are entitled to the same rest breaks “if they need to be available for work during this time. For example, they're checking emails or responding to phone calls.” A manager who expects replies in the evening is extending working time, whatever the policy calls it.
• Rest. Regulation 10 gives a worker “a rest period of not less than eleven consecutive hours in each 24-hour period”; regulation 11 an “uninterrupted rest period of not less than 24 hours in each seven-day period” (or, if the employer so determines, two 24-hour periods or one 48-hour period in each fourteen days); and regulation 12 a rest break of “not less than 20 minutes” where “daily working time is more than six hours”. Regulation 4 caps working time at “an average of 48 hours for each seven days” unless the worker has agreed in writing to opt out. Young workers have longer rest entitlements.
• Stress. The Health and Safety Executive’s stress risk assessment guidance says “Employers have a legal duty to protect workers from stress at work by doing a risk assessment and acting on it”, and that “If you have five or more workers, you are required by law to write the risk assessment down.” Its Management Standards cover “six areas of work design which can affect stress levels – demands, control, support, relationships, role, and change”. A culture of constant evening messages is a demand, and it belongs in that assessment.

Acas’s guidance on managing staff who work from home puts the practical point in one sentence: “Constant or unnecessary contact can cause stress and affect morale.” And the contract matters: if it sets hours and says nothing about being available outside them, a requirement to respond outside them is not something the contract provides for, and should be agreed rather than assumed.

These rules apply in Great Britain; Northern Ireland has its own working time legislation, with similar entitlements, so check the Northern Ireland version before relying on a regulation number there.

What a right to disconnect policy should say

The clearest model is not British. Ireland’s Workplace Relations Commission published a Code of Practice for Employers and Employees on the Right to Disconnect in 2021. The Irish code is not UK law, but its three elements make a sensible structure for a voluntary UK policy: “The right of an employee to not routinely perform work outside normal working hours”; “The right to not be penalised for refusing to attend to work matters outside of normal working hours”; and “The duty to respect another person’s right to disconnect (e.g., by not routinely emailing or calling outside normal working hours).”

A policy for a school, charity or care provider should cover, in plain sentences:

1. Whom it covers: employees, and separately the expectations on volunteers and trustees, whose time is given rather than contracted.
2. Normal working hours for each group of staff, including shift patterns, part-time days and term-time contracts.
3. The core rule: nobody is expected to read or reply to work messages outside their working hours or on leave, and nobody will be treated less favourably for not doing so.
4. Sending, as well as replying: messages may be written at any time, but routine messages are scheduled for working hours, and a message sent late says that no reply is expected.
5. The urgent route: what counts as urgent, and the one way to raise it – usually a phone call to the named on-call manager – so that urgency never depends on someone reading a group chat.
6. On-call and standby arrangements: who is on call, when, how it is recorded and paid, and how working time and rest are protected for them.
7. Groups: no routine messages to staff groups outside agreed hours; a message to a group is not an instruction to any individual; members may mute work groups when off duty.
8. Managers’ duties: managers model the policy, do not reward out-of-hours replies, and raise patterns of late working as a workload question.
9. Exceptions: genuine emergencies, safeguarding and safety, named and narrow.
10. Raising a concern: how staff can say the policy is not being followed, and through which procedure.
11. Review: an owner, a review date and the measures checked.

Agree it with staff and any recognised union rather than issuing it; the Irish code expects the same. And connect it to the staff messaging policy, which sets the channels the out-of-hours rule applies to.

Schools, care and charities: where out of hours is part of the job

A blanket ban on evening contact does not survive contact with a care home, a residential trip or a safeguarding concern. The policy has to be written for the work.

• Schools. The Department for Education’s workload reduction toolkit publishes an example school email protocol which says “Staff are not expected to check email outside of working hours.” The same principle should cover staff groups and messages from leaders, with two exceptions written in: the designated safeguarding lead’s out-of-hours arrangements, and trips and residentials, where the trip lead is on duty by definition.
• Care providers. The service runs at night, so the policy is about who is contacted, not whether. Acas notes that “Sleep-in time usually counts as working time, even if the person spends it asleep.” Off-duty carers should not be the cover route: the rota, the on-call manager and the agency are. Shift-swap requests to off-duty staff belong in working hours or in a place they can ignore without penalty.
• Charities. Volunteers and trustees are the people most often messaged at night, because they work in the day. Say that no volunteer is expected to respond outside the times they have offered, and that trustee business between meetings has a proper route, not a running chat.

In each sector, the test is whether a member of staff who switches their phone off at the end of a shift misses anything they needed. If they do, the information is in the wrong place, or the urgent route is not working.

Making it work: habits that matter more than wording

Policies on out-of-hours contact fail quietly. They are usually broken by the people who wrote them, at the end of a long day, with a message that “doesn’t need a reply”. The habits that make the policy real are small:

• schedule routine messages for the next working morning, and use the delay-send function the organisation’s email and messaging tools already have;
• write the expectation into the message when it must be sent late: “for Monday, no reply needed”;
• keep a short, published list of what counts as urgent, with the phone number of the person on call;
• agree which work groups staff may mute, and make sure nothing essential is posted only there;
• look at the pattern every term or quarter: who sends most messages after hours, and who feels obliged to answer them, which is a workload and wellbeing finding for the stress risk assessment rather than a disciplinary one.

A policy also needs to say what happens to a message that arrives anyway. Staff should be told plainly that they may leave it until their next working day, and that if it contains something urgent, the sender used the wrong route.

The message sent at ten at night is still a record

A right to disconnect policy decides when staff are expected to read messages. It does not change what those messages are. Some of the most important messages an organisation receives arrive out of hours, because that is when people have time to write them: the teaching assistant who has been worrying all evening about something a pupil said, the night carer reporting a fall, the volunteer who has decided to resign, the parent who has finally put a complaint into words.

When the policy says “don’t reply until the morning”, those messages wait. Where they wait matters. If the out-of-hours route is the manager’s personal WhatsApp, the message that started a safeguarding concern sits on a phone the organisation does not hold, in an app whose end-to-end encryption means the organisation cannot retrieve it. If the route is a staff group, it has been seen by twenty people and acted on by none, because nobody was on duty. In the morning the manager acts on it, from memory or a screenshot, and the formal record begins there.

So the policy has a second job besides protecting evenings: making sure that the messages which must not wait reach a named person by a route the organisation controls, and that the messages which can wait land somewhere the organisation will still have them when it needs them. The question for the next leadership or board meeting is this: when someone needs to reach us out of hours, which channel does our policy send them to, and could we produce that conversation next month?

Questions people ask

Is there a right to disconnect in the UK?

No. As at 3 October 2026 there is no statutory right to disconnect or right to switch off in UK law. The government said in 2024 that it would take forward a right to switch off through a statutory Code of Practice, but no code has been published, and the Employment Rights Act 2025 does not contain the right.

Can my boss text me after hours in the UK?

Yes: no UK law prevents an employer from texting or messaging staff outside working hours. What the law controls is the work: under the Working Time Regulations 1998, time a worker is required to spend working counts as working time, and workers are entitled to 11 consecutive hours’ rest in each 24-hour period and 24 hours’ uninterrupted rest each week. Many employers also adopt a policy that out-of-hours messages need no reply until the next working day.

Is it okay to email after work hours?

Sending a work email after hours is lawful, but it can create an expectation of a reply that a policy should remove. The Department for Education’s example school email protocol says “Staff are not expected to check email outside of working hours”; a common practice is to schedule routine messages for the next working day.

What is a good out-of-office message for after hours?

A good after-hours message states your working hours and that no reply is expected outside the recipient’s own. The Irish Workplace Relations Commission’s Code of Practice on the Right to Disconnect offers two templates: “My normal working hours are from X to Y. I will respond to you when I am back at work” for an out-of-office reply, and, as an email footer, “I am currently working flexibly so while it suits me to send this email now, I do not expect a response or action outside your own working hours”.

Am I legally entitled to a break on a 7 hour shift?

Yes. Regulation 12 of the Working Time Regulations 1998 entitles a worker whose daily working time “is more than six hours” to a rest break of “not less than 20 minutes”, which they may spend away from their workstation; a collective or workforce agreement can vary the details. Workers under 18 are entitled to 30 minutes once their working time is more than four and a half hours.

Is a 30-minute lunch break legal in the UK?

Yes. The legal minimum for an adult worker whose daily working time is more than six hours is an uninterrupted rest break of “not less than 20 minutes” under regulation 12 of the Working Time Regulations 1998, so a 30-minute break meets it. The contract or a collective agreement can give more, and whether the break is paid depends on the contract.

Where to read the official position, and your next step

For the policy commitment, read the government’s Next steps to make work pay and check the implementation timeline for any change. For the law that applies now, the Working Time Regulations 1998, Acas’s guidance on being on call and the HSE’s stress risk assessment pages are the places to start. Quotations are from those pages as read on 3 October 2026.

This guide is a summary for employers in Great Britain, not legal advice. Contracts, on-call arrangements and collective agreements vary; take advice before changing terms.

Then do one thing: look at the last fortnight of messages your managers sent to staff after 7pm, and sort them into those that were urgent and those that could have been scheduled. The second pile is the case for the policy; the first tells you what the urgent route has to carry.