Victoria's Right to Work From Home — what employers and employees need to know

What the Bill actually does

On 16 July 2026, the Victorian Government introduced the Equal Opportunity Amendment (Work from Home) Bill 2026. Rather than creating standalone legislation, the Bill amends the Equal Opportunity Act 2010 (Vic) — the same Act that governs discrimination and harassment across the state.

The core entitlement is straightforward. Eligible full-time employees gain a statutory right to work from home two days per week, with a pro-rata equivalent for part-time and regular casual staff. If passed in its current form, the right takes effect on 1 September 2026 for most employers, with a delayed commencement of 1 July 2027 for businesses employing fewer than 15 people.

Several features make this scheme genuinely different from the flexible-work arrangements Australians already know under the Fair Work Act:

• The burden sits with the employer. Under the existing federal right to request flexible work, an employee asks and the employer may refuse on reasonable business grounds. Victoria's model flips the starting position: eligible employees have the entitlement, and the employer must justify any refusal.
• A reasonable-business-grounds test governs refusals. Genuine grounds include the requirements of the role, productivity, safety, supervision and training, client and customer needs, confidentiality, cost, and scheduling. The test is real, but the employer carries the responsibility of making the case.
• Employers must meet reasonable costs. Where an employee works from home, the employer is liable for reasonable costs including essential hardware, software, and secure system access.
• A defined process applies. The employee gives written notice of the days, times, and location; the employer must respond in writing within a set period.

One important point of clarification: Victoria's scheme is a state entitlement built into anti-discrimination law. It is separate from the federal work-from-home proposal that would empower the Fair Work Commission to hear disputes about refused requests. The federal proposal remains under review; the Victorian scheme is the concrete, imminent one for Victorian workplaces.

Where disputes will happen

Any time the law shifts a burden and attaches a cost, it creates friction. The Victorian scheme is likely to generate disputes in three predictable places.

The reasonableness of a refusal. An employee lodges a written notice; the employer refuses on business grounds; the employee believes the grounds are a pretext or simply disagrees with the weighting. Because "reasonable business grounds" is an evaluative standard rather than a bright line, honest people will land on different answers — particularly in roles that are partly client-facing or that involve on-the-job supervision.

Cost allocation. What counts as a reasonable cost necessary to enable home-based work? A laptop and a VPN licence are uncontroversial. A standing desk, a share of home internet, an ergonomic chair, or a second monitor sit in greyer territory. These are small sums individually, but they scale across a workforce and generate resentment quickly when handled inconsistently.

The relationship fallout. Often the most damaging. A refused request can leave an employee feeling undervalued and an employer feeling second-guessed. Left unaddressed, that tension bleeds into performance, engagement, and team cohesion. It is worth noting that interpersonal conflict and unreasonable work demands are recognised psychosocial hazards under work health and safety law — Safe Work Australia — mental health provides guidance on managing them. A poorly handled work-from-home dispute is not just an HR headache; mishandled, it can become a safety and compliance issue.

For a broader picture of how remote and hybrid friction fits alongside related issues, our discussion of the right to disconnect and workplace mediation covers overlapping ground many employers are grappling with at the same time.

Mediation vs tribunal: a comparison

Resolving a Victorian work-from-home dispute: mediation vs formal tribunal

Factor	Mediation	VEOHRC / VCAT
Typical timeframe	Days to weeks	Months (often 6–12+)
Cost	Fixed, transparent, low	Legal fees + management time
Confidentiality	Fully private	Conciliation private; VCAT public
Outcome control	Parties decide	Tribunal imposes
Relationship impact	Designed to preserve it	Adversarial by nature
WHS compliance signal	Demonstrates proactive risk management	No equivalent signal
Creative solutions	Trial periods, hybrid splits, cost-sharing	Limited to what the Act allows

The formal pathway: VEOHRC and VCAT

Because the new right lives inside the Equal Opportunity Act, disputes flow through that Act's existing enforcement machinery. Unresolved matters can be taken to the Victorian Equal Opportunity & Human Rights Commission for conciliation, and escalated to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal where conciliation does not resolve them.

This is a legitimate and important pathway, and no one should be discouraged from using it where it is the right fit. But it is worth being clear about what a formal process involves. Tribunal timelines are measured in months, not days. The process is adversarial by nature, positioning the parties against each other at exactly the moment their working relationship most needs repair. And while conciliation is confidential, a matter that proceeds to a tribunal hearing enters a more public and formal arena — reputational exposure for the employer, and potentially awkward Monday mornings for an employee who still wants to keep their job.

The formal route makes sense when rights genuinely need to be tested, when the relationship has already broken down beyond repair, or when a party is acting in bad faith. For the large majority of work-from-home disagreements, though, the underlying problem is not a legal question at all. It is two reasonable people who want different things and have run out of ways to talk about it productively.

Why mediation is the better first move

Mediation is built precisely for the kind of dispute the new right will generate: a genuine disagreement between people who have to keep working together afterwards. Our nationally accredited workplace mediators work with employers and employees to reach practical, durable arrangements without the cost, delay, and adversarial edge of a tribunal.

The advantages map directly onto the pressures the new law creates:

• Speed. A mediation can often be arranged within days or weeks. A contested tribunal matter can take many months. When the question is "which two days can I work from home," a resolution measured in months arrives long after the damage is done.
• Cost. Mediation is a fraction of the cost of tribunal proceedings, and it is quoted transparently up front.
• Confidentiality. Mediation is a private process with no public record. For an employer conscious of reputation and an employee conscious of their standing at work, that privacy is genuinely valuable.
• Control. In mediation, the parties design the outcome — a trial period, a hybrid split that flexes around client meetings, a clear cost-sharing agreement, or a review date built into the arrangement. Courts and tribunals impose; mediation lets the parties decide.
• Preservation of the relationship. A work-from-home dispute is not a one-off transaction; the two parties have to collaborate the following week. Mediation is designed to resolve the immediate issue while keeping the working relationship intact.
• Higher compliance. People stick to agreements they helped create. An arrangement reached collaboratively in mediation is far more likely to be honoured than one imposed from outside.

There is also a compliance dimension that is easy to overlook. An employer who engages constructively and mediates a work-from-home dispute early is demonstrably managing the psychosocial and interpersonal risks that WHS law requires them to control. Choosing mediation is not only the commercially sensible option — it is evidence of a business taking its obligations seriously.

Practical steps for employers

The commencement date for most Victorian employers is 1 September 2026, which leaves a short runway. A few steps will put your business in a stronger position before the first notice arrives.

1. Audit your workforce for eligibility. Identify which employees will be eligible and map the roles where home-based work is straightforward versus genuinely difficult to accommodate.
2. Update your policies and your written-response process. You must respond to notices in writing within the required timeframe and be able to articulate reasonable business grounds where you refuse. Have a consistent, documented approach ready before the first notice arrives.
3. Decide your cost position in advance. Work out what you will and won't cover, and apply it consistently. Inconsistency is where resentment and disputes breed.
4. Train your managers. The people fielding these notices need to understand the reasonableness test and know how to have the conversation without escalating it unnecessarily.
5. Build a resolution pathway into your process. Include early mediation as a step your internal process routes to before a disagreement hardens into a formal claim. Our workplace mediation service can be engaged quickly and confidentially.

Practical steps for employees

If you are a Victorian employee wondering what the new right means in practice:

1. Understand your eligibility. Check whether you are a full-time, part-time, or regular casual employee who meets the threshold, and confirm your employer is covered by the commencement date that applies to them.
2. Put your request in writing with the specific days, times, and location the law requires. A clear, professional notice is the right starting point.
3. Engage constructively. A collaborative approach — including being open to discussion about which days work best for the business — makes a workable outcome far more likely than an adversarial one.
4. If you hit a wall, consider mediation before escalation. It is faster, private, and far more likely to preserve the working relationship you presumably want to keep. The formal VEOHRC and VCAT pathways exist and are important — but they are rarely the best first step.

The bottom line

Victoria's right to work from home is a meaningful shift in the balance between employers and employees, and it lands in a matter of weeks for most Victorian businesses. It will create disputes, because any rule that reallocates burden and cost creates disagreement at the margins. The question is not whether those disputes will happen, but how they will be resolved.

The formal route through VEOHRC and VCAT exists for the matters that truly need it. But for the everyday disagreements this law will produce — the refused request, the contested cost, the strained relationship — mediation resolves the issue faster, more cheaply, more privately, and in a way that keeps people working together afterwards. It is the difference between a problem resolved this month and a problem litigated next year.

We work with both employers and employees across Victoria and Australia-wide, including through mediation in Melbourne and online. If you are an employer preparing for 1 September 2026, or an employee who has hit a wall on a work-from-home request, our accredited team can help.