The Victorian government plans to give eligible workers a legal right to work from home two days a week from 1 September 2026 that will be written into anti-discrimination law. This review treats the arrangement as an open question rather than a settled good. It asks what the work health and safety duty requires when the workplace is one the employer cannot enter, whether home-based work can be justified on safety grounds at all, and what follows for small business and for local jobs once a role is formally classed as one that can be done from anywhere.
What working from home legislation is proposed
The Allan Government has confirmed that Victorians whose roles can reasonably be performed from home will gain a legal right to do so for two days a week, with the change due to commence on 1 September 2026 (Premier of Victoria 2026). The right is to be written into the Equal Opportunity Act 2010 (Vic), and disputes will run through the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission and, if conciliation fails, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. A bill is expected in July 2026 and had not been introduced when this article was prepared, so the detail may yet change, and several commentators currently expect a constitutional challenge over a state law reaching into workplace relations.
The right turns on whether a role can reasonably be performed from home, which is a fundamentally a question about the nature of the work. It does not address whether the home is a safe place to perform that work or who must make it safe. Those are occupational health and safety questions, and the proposed law currently does not deal with them at all.
The working from home arrangement is common throughout Australia. The Australian Bureau of Statistics recorded 37 per cent of Australians working from home regularly in August 2023, and close to 60 per cent of managers and professionals (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2023). Whatever becomes of the bill, the safety questions apply now, to a large part of the Victorian workforce.
The occupational health and safety duty applies to the home
Victoria has not adopted the harmonised work health and safety laws introduced by Safework Australia. Rather it keeps occupational health and safety terminology and the language of the “employer” rather than the “person conducting a business or undertaking”. Under the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 (Vic), an employer must provide and maintain, so far as is reasonably practicable, a working environment that is safe and without risks to health (section 21). WorkSafe Victoria states plainly that this duty applies when an employee works somewhere other than the usual workplace, the home included (WorkSafe Victoria n.d.). The employer must also consult employees and any health and safety representatives on decisions that affect their health or safety, which covers decisions about home-based work (section 35). The worker has a duty too, to take reasonable care for their own safety and that of others (section 25).
Psychological health is also part of the definition of health in the Act, and a recent change has given that more force. The Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025 (Vic) commenced on 1 December 2025 and require employers to identify psychosocial hazards and to eliminate or reduce the associated risks so far as is reasonably practicable, with first preference given to changing how work is designed and managed. These obligations apply to a worker at home in the same way they apply to a worker in the office.
Can an employer control the home?
Home-based work differs from other workplace questions in one important respect in that it is a unique proposition to manage under occupational health and safety legislation. The section 21 duty does not shrink because the employer happens not to own the premises, it is fundamentally a personal duty owed to the worker wherever the work is done. What the duty requires, though is only what is reasonably practicable, and that depends on what the employer can actually do and what is reasonably foreseeable. In an office the employer can inspect the area, change the layout, replace a faulty switchboard, add guarding to equipment, repair the aircon or shut the space down. In a worker’s home it can do none of that. It has no right to enter the premises, no ability to rewire the study or replace the worn stair carpet or improve the ventilation. It depends instead on what the worker reports and on the worker’s own care, so section 25 and genuine consultation likely matter more here than they do elsewhere in the workplace
This aspect likely produces a significant tension with the hierarchy of control. For a physical hazard in the home, the higher-order options of elimination and engineering control usually need physical changes the employer is not permitted to make. The employer is left with the lower-order measures the hierarchy treats with caution. Things like information, instruction, training, and the supply of equipment such as a monitor or a chair. The Psychological Health Regulations push the opposite way, expecting risk to be controlled by changing the design of the work before any reliance on information or training.
The practical answer is likely to manage the part of the arrangement the employer can actually shape. Its fair to say that an employer has little control over the physical room, but it sets the workload, the hours, the expectation of after-hours contact, the level of supervision (albeit remotely), the online support available to the worker, and the design of the job. In the language of the hierarchy these are higher-order measures, whatever a policy happens to call them, and for psychosocial risk they carry most of the weight, because the factors the research links to harm at home are these work design factors and not the house itself.
The same limits likely shape what happens post an incident in the home. The employer still has to respond, and to notify the regulator where the threshold is met, but the employer has to do this without free access to the scene and depends on the worker’s account and whatever records exist. Consultation under section 35 has to be run in ways that respect a private home, for example a guided self-assessment that the worker completes and the employer then reviews. Safetysure’s own approach goes beyond the statutory test to the common law duty of care, which extends to harm that was reasonably foreseeable. An argument that the home typically lies beyond the employer’s reach may not succeed if the harm could have been foreseen and the work could have been organised to prevent it.
The state of the evidence on working from home
The research on home-based work and health is more extensive than it used to be, but it is not strong and most of it was produced during the pandemic. That last point matters for Victoria more than for almost anywhere else in the world.
The most careful synthesis is a 2022 systematic review by Lunde and colleagues at Norway’s National Institute of Occupational Health (Lunde et al. 2022). They examined fourteen studies covering nearly 23,000 workers and rated the overall body of evidence as low or very low quality. Most of the studies were cross-sectional, which cannot show cause and effect. They measured both home-based work and health in inconsistent ways, and over half the participants were American. When the reviewers looked only at the better-quality studies, no clear link to any health outcome survived the scrutiny. The associations turned up mainly in the weaker studies, which is potentially what tends to happen when a finding is an ultimately an artefact of poor research methodology. The reviewers also deliberately left out workers under strict pandemic lockdowns, because telework during the pandemic is tangled up with everything else the pandemic involved.
The Australian research points the same way in that Oakman and colleagues at La Trobe University found that working at home affected physical and mental health in both directions, depending on the workspace, the support available, the demands of the job, and the worker’s own situation, and they too noted how weak much of the evidence was (Oakman et al. 2020). Ergonomics is the physical theme that recurs, with home set-ups frequently improvised, although a good deal of that evidence also came from hurried pandemic arrangements (de Macêdo et al. 2020).
The fair reading is that home-based work produces no consistent health effect on its own when isolated. What likely decides the outcome is how the work is designed, how much choice the worker had in the arrangement, and how well it is supported. For an employer that is the practical message, since those are the conditions it can influence.
The Victorian pandemic experience
Victoria has already lived through mandatory home-based work on a mass scale, and the data from it is both useful and easy to misread. Between March 2020 and October 2021 Melbourne spent a cumulative 262 days under six lockdowns, the longest run of any city in the world (Al Jazeera 2021). On Census night in August 2021, with the state locked down, about 26 per cent of employed Victorians, roughly 814,000 people, were working from home (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2022).
Over the same years, mental injury grew sharply as a share of the Victorian workers’ compensation scheme. WorkSafe Victoria’s figures put it at around 9 per cent of claims before 2009, 13.1 per cent in 2020-21, and 15.1 per cent in 2021-22, when 4,340 of 28,682 new claims were for mental injury; the regulator expects the share to reach a third by the end of the decade (WorkSafe Victoria 2021, 2022). The claims are also costly. About three quarters of workers with a physical injury are back at work within six months, compared with roughly 40 per cent of those with a mental injury, so the time lost and the cost both run higher (WorkSafe Victoria 2022).
It would be a mistake for a reader to assume that rise as the price of working from home, it is not. The increases started well before the pandemic and has carried on since, so on the surface, it looks like a long-run structural shift rather than a lockdown effect. A large part of the pandemic’s psychological toll also fell on people who never worked from home at all, in health care, aged care, emergency services, and retail. The causes behind mental injury claims are typically work pressure, bullying, harassment, and exposure to violence or trauma, which are matters of how work is organised, wherever that work is done. The lockdown period mixed home-based work together with fear of infection, caring responsibilities, lost income, and an isolation that had nothing to do with the job, and no set of claims data can likely untangle those threads after the event.
The Victorian pandemic episode is genuinely instructive in that it shows how expensive and slow to reverse psychosocial harm at work can be over the long term. It does not, and cannot, show what home-based work on its own does to a worker’s health, because that variable was never isolated from available data. An employer hoping the evidence will settle the question is unfortunately going to be disappointed with the outcome.
One Australian study speaks directly to a mandated entitlement by drawing on three waves of the Employees Working from Home study. Graham and colleagues found that older workers reported more stress, and were more likely to report musculoskeletal pain, when they worked from home more days than they wanted to (Graham et al. 2023). A guaranteed two days can take some workers past the amount that suits them, and the study connects that mismatch to worse health for some workers. For many people the right will be welcome and for some it will not be. The employer’s duty is owed just as much to the second group.
The hazards the literature keeps returning to for home-based work are isolation, the blurring of the boundary between work and home, and longer hours driven by an expectation of constant availability. That last hazard runs into The Australian federal right to disconnect from the workplace, now part of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), which has applied to larger employers since 26 August 2024 and to small businesses since 26 August 2025 (Fair Work Ombudsman 2025). A Victorian employer with staff working at home is now subject to three legal instruments together – a State based right to work from home, a Commonwealth right to disconnect, and a State psychosocial duty. These need to be written as one consistent set of expectations, or they will likely contradict one another. The home is also clearly not a safe environment for every worker with family violence is one of the psychosocial hazards named in the Victorian Compliance Code, so an assessment that treats the home as automatically safe is incomplete.
Whether it should happen at all
All of this raises a question the legislation does not and that is whether home-based work should be permitted in the first place. The hierarchy of control prefers removing a hazard to managing it, and the workplace where removal is possible is the one the employer can enter and change. Measured against that standard, the controlled office is the higher-order option, and shifting work into a home the employer cannot inspect or fix is a step down rather than a neutral move. The weak state of the evidence may sharpen the doubt, since nothing in it establishes that home-based work is inherently safe. For some roles, some workers, and some homes, the answer that best fits the duty is to limit home-based work or to refuse it. The right points the other way in that it moves the employer toward yes, permits refusal only on narrow grounds, and gives the safety duty no stated priority over the entitlement, so an employer whose own assessment points to no may have little room to act on it.
It is fair to say that home-based work removes some genuine hazards, the road trauma of commuting and work driving among the most serious, and it can lower exposure to aggression and infection. It clearly has environmental benefits by removing polluting vehicles from roads. For a worker with a disability or a heavy caring load it may be both the safer and the fairer option, which is part of why the right to work from home sits in equal opportunity law. The duty is reasonable practicability, not perfection, and many homes can be made adequately safe through assessment, equipment, and sensible work design. The conclusion is that home-based work is not safe or unsafe in the abstract sense. Whether it is justified turns on the role, the worker, and the home, and the situations where it is not justified are the ones the new right makes hardest to manage.
If the work can be done from home, couldn’t it can be done from anywhere?
The right also sits inside a larger shift that may work against the people it is meant to protect. Its fundamentally a threshold question, whether a role can reasonably be performed from home, is close to the test economists use to identify work that can be sent offshore. Baldwin and Dingel, who coined the term telemigrant for a worker who lives in one country and is employed in another, class a job as highly offshoreable when the worker does not need to be physically close to a particular location or work unit (Baldwin & Dingel 2021). A role that qualifies for the Victorian right has, on that definition, already answered the off-shorability question. In requiring employers to identify which roles are location-independent, the law intriguingly produces a ready list of the work that could in principle be done elsewhere, and elsewhere is frequently cheaper.
This may add incentive to employers when the right to work from home adds cost and oversight to employing a local home worker, through the safety duty over the home, equipment, psychosocial management, and the overlap of the three instruments above. It also removes the employer’s ability to require attendance, which had been one way of keeping roles local, supervised and building a workplace culture. An employer weighing a local home-based employee, with full entitlements and an occupational safety duty attached, against an offshore contractor on lower rates and outside the Australian regime, faces an interesting contrast that potentially never existed before.
The work health and safety consequence is indirect but worth highlighting. The protections this article has described, the section 21 duty, the psychosocial regulations, and the right to disconnect, apply only to workers in Victoria. Work that moves offshore moves to people the an area that may not cover it, so the overall effect on worker protection could also be negative even when no employer does anything wrong. Job insecurity and the prospect of restructuring are themselves, recognised psychosocial hazards, which means the threat of substitution weighs on the workers who remains.
Baldwin and Dingel’s own modelling suggests the displacement of workers in high-wage countries is likely to be modest rather than wholesale, since baseline trade in services is small, although they describe conditions in which small changes could have larger effects (Baldwin & Dingel 2021). Offshoring also predates this law and does not depend solely on it, the barriers of time zone, data security, professional licensing, and client preference remain, and no one has modelled what the Victorian right specifically would likely do. The connection drawn here is one of logic and incentive, not measured effect. It belongs in the discussion because the question that triggers the right to work from home is, in substance, the question that marks a job as offshoreable.
Small business impact of right to work from home
The Premier has said that small business workers who can work from home will have the right protected, and the Government estimates the change will affect up to 1.3 million Victorians employed by small businesses (Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry 2026). Workplaces with fewer than 15 employees are given until 1 July 2027, on the stated basis that they need time to update their HR policies and procedures (Premier of Victoria 2026).
That extra time is easy to misread and it does very little for occupational safety in practice. The delay attaches to the equal opportunity right alone; the safety duty is unaffected. Section 21 already applies to a small employer whose staff work from home, and so have the Psychological Health Regulations since December 2025 and the right to disconnect since August 2025. Many small employers already have people working from home, which means they already carry the full occupational health and safety load. The 2027 date postpones the right to work from home but changes nothing about the duty that applies now.
Small businesses usually carry that load on a thin base often struggling to make health and safety work in a practice sense. Most have no safety adviser, some no health and safety representative, no ergonomist, and many have no written HR policies to bring up to date. The arrangement assumes an infrastructure that a five-person firm may simply not have. The reasonably practicable test does take account of this and what is expected of a large employer with a professional safety team is likely not what is expected of a micro-business, and the cost and availability of controls are part of the assessment. That is an adjustment, not an exemption in entirety. A small employer cannot rely on its size as a reason to do nothing, and “we are too small to manage this” is likely not a position a WorkSafe Inspector or a court will accept. What works for a small business is usually modest and inexpensive. A sound home-workstation self-assessment, clear guidance, a few items of equipment where they are genuinely needed, a sensible position on hours and contact, and a written record of how the decisions were reached. The time before 2027 is best used to put that simple system in place and implement it.
What this all means for Victorian employers
For a Victorian employer the first step is honest assessment of whether a given role can be performed safely from a given home, and whether, for that worker, home-based work raises or lowers the risk. Where the assessment points away from home-based work, the right narrows the employer’s options but does not remove the duty, and the reasoning behind any limit should be recorded with care. Where home-based work goes ahead, and for most roles it will, it should sit fully inside the safety management system instead of running as a human resources arrangement.
We recommend folding working from home into existing hazard identification and risk assessment, covering workstation set-up, electrical safety, and the emergency arrangements that apply when no colleague is nearby, through a self-assessment the worker completes and the employer verifies, with equipment provided where the assessment shows a need.
Working from home should also be drawn into the psychosocial risk cycle the 2025 Regulations now require, with isolation, low support, and excessive hours identified as hazards, assessed honestly, controlled through the design of work, and reviewed for effect. Because the research cannot tell an employer whether its own arrangements are safe, the better evidence is the employer’s own: incident reports, absence, turnover, and the patterns in its workers’ compensation experience. The work from home policy, the right to disconnect policy, and the psychosocial controls work best written as a single set, so they reinforce one another. Decisions should be documented, since a defensible position depends on showing what was reasonably practicable given the limits of control. Managers also need preparation, both to support people they no longer see each day and to pick up the early signs of distress that a shared office would surface on its own.
We add that it is not yet certain that the bill will pass in its announced form, or that it would survive a constitutional challenge, but the occupational health and safety obligation does not wait on either.
Once a Victorian works from home, the employer owes the full duty over premises it cannot enter, on the strength of evidence too weak and too entangled with the pandemic to show the arrangement is safe. For many roles it will still be reasonable, and can be made adequately safe through good design and steady attention to the workforce. In other cases the duty points toward limiting it, and the new right makes that harder to act on.
There is also a longer-run risk that the roles best suited to working from home are the ones most easily moved offshore, so a worker can qualify for the right and, for the same reason, find the work sent elsewhere. None of this settles whether home-based work is a good thing. The primary point is that it deserves to be worked through on a case by case basis, with the duty, the evidence, and the consequences in view, rather than treated as a settled entitlement to be administered.
You might like to read our Article on Working from Home Safely
References
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