Nearly half of workers clock in on Sundays, says recent survey

Alessia Montanaro is just about to close her second busy season of the year. Since September she’s been logging up to 60 hours of work per week, sometimes going as late as 11 p.m., and making a habit of working Sundays from her home office.

The 30-year-old works in public accounting in Austin, Texas, and has gotten used to these sprints around tax season. She’s not the only weekend work warrior.

For many office workers, Sundays have become the unofficial new start to their workweek: Nearly half of workers often clock in on Sundays, according to a recent report from Owl Labs, the video-conferencing technology company, which surveyed 2,000 people in July with a margin of error of 2%. Some 21% of people surveyed say they work the whole or nearly the whole day, and another 24% say they often do a few hours of work.

Of the remaining set of workers, 11% say they quickly check messages but don’t really work, 18% say they rarely do any work on Sundays, and 26% say they never do.

It’s been six years since work for many moved home during the Covid-19 pandemic, opening the possibilities of logging hours anytime and anywhere there’s Wi-Fi. While some people deprioritized work and put up strict boundaries to protect their personal time, tech use data shows that many years later, working time has bled into every hour of every day. Chat messages sent outside of the standard Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. workweek rose 15% year-over-year, now up to an average 58 messages per user, according to Microsoft’s 2025 research on what it calls the rise of the “infinite workday.”

Among those working on the weekends, nearly 20% check their email before noon on a Saturday and Sunday, and over 5% are in their inboxes on Sunday nights, per Microsoft.

As far as these online habits show, the sanctity of Sundays off may be vanishing as an always-on work culture takes over.

The work of getting work done can be disruptive: Employees are interrupted roughly every two minutes during core work hours with meetings, emails or chat messages, according to Microsoft data. Some 38% of workers say they have meeting fatigue, with the most common gripes being that meetings are too long and there are too many of them, according to Owl Labs.

Weishaupt says Sunday work periods could be seen as a good thing “as it relates to the employee’s desire for flexibility” and a growing interest in “microshifting,” a term Owl Labs coined to mean working outside of a…