Flexible Working Arrangements

A flexible working arrangement is any agreed change to the standard way you work: different start and finish times, compressed weeks, part-time hours, job sharing, or working from home some or all days. It can be an informal handshake with your manager, but the formal version lives in section 65 of the Fair Work Act. That section gives specified workers a legal right to make a written request and to get a proper answer, not a shrug in the kitchen.

The formal right covers parents of school-age children, carers, people with disability and workers aged 55 or over. It also covers anyone experiencing family and domestic violence, or supporting someone who is. You generally need 12 months of service, or to be a regular and systematic casual with a reasonable expectation of continuing work. Your employer must genuinely discuss the request and respond in writing within 21 days, and can refuse only on reasonable business grounds after trying to reach agreement.

The formal process has a defined shape. You make a written request stating what change you are seeking and why, tied to one of the section 65 categories. Your employer must then genuinely discuss it with you and reply in writing within 21 days of the request. Keep the request factual and dated, because the 21-day clock starts when it is received. A yes should be documented with the new pattern; a no must explain the reasonable business grounds and show they tried to find an alternative.

Reasonable business grounds are things like the change being too costly, the impracticality of restructuring other workers' arrangements, or a genuine loss of productivity or customer service. Simply preferring bums on seats is not on the list. Since June 2023, if an employer unreasonably refuses or never properly responds, you can escalate to the Fair Work Commission (fairwork.gov.au), which can now make binding decisions. A refusal must be specific, because vagueness is treated as non-response in practice. Informal flexibility is still fine when it works, but the formal right is the lever when it does not.

Flexibility is worth real money, which is why bosses guard it and why you should treat it as compensation. Cutting a one-hour-each-way commute by two days a week hands back about eight hours and roughly $60 to $80 in petrol or fares per week. Over a year that is close to $3,500 in costs and 400 hours of your life, which at a $45 hourly rate values around $18,000 in recovered time. A 5% pay rise on a $90,000 salary is $4,500 before tax, so do the arithmetic.

A colleague named Brent (yes, that Brent) spent two years sulking about his commute instead of lodging a section 65 request he actually qualified for as a carer for his dad. When he finally wrote the three-paragraph email, his employer approved two work-from-home days in eleven days, well inside the 21-day window. Brent then celebrated by buying a standing desk he uses as a shelf. The law worked harder than he did.

Do the maths before you negotiate. Run your travel costs through the commute vs WFH tool, and if you do work from home, price the tax side with the work from home tax deduction calculator. The ATO's fixed rate method at ato.gov.au currently allows 70 cents per hour worked from home, which adds up quietly but surely.