Alessia Montanaro is wrapping up her second busy season of the year—logging up to 60 hours a week, sometimes until 11 p.m., and working Sundays from her home office in Austin, Texas. The 30-year-old public accountant is far from alone.
Nearly half of workers routinely log in on Sundays, according to a July survey of 2,000 people by video-conferencing firm Owl Labs. About 21% work the entire day or close to it; another 24% put in a few hours. Six years after Covid pushed work into the home, labor has bled into every hour: off-hours chat messages jumped 15% year-over-year to an average of 58 per user, per Microsoft's 2025 "infinite workday" research.
Why Sundays?
For many, it's the only quiet time. "I get pulled in five different directions" during the week, Montanaro says. Employees are interrupted roughly every two minutes during core hours, Microsoft found—and 38% report meeting fatigue. Owl Labs CEO Frank Weishaupt calls Sunday work a sign of workers' hunger for "microshifting"—logging hours outside the 9-to-5—which especially helps moms and caregivers like 29-year-old Kylie Gonzalez, who catches up on Sundays after weekday school pickups. But she's wary: "Some companies may take advantage of that fact and add more to your plate."
The darker driver: anxiety. "My Sunday evening feels awful because I'm just thinking about Monday and all the work that I didn't finish on Friday," says 28-year-old Dallas consultant Tobi Collins. In a tough job market—layoffs looming, AI raising expectations—Weishaupt sees Sunday hours as a survival tactic: workers "doing anything they can to hug that job." Left unchecked, 40-hour weeks become 60, breeding burnout and churn.
LaToya Allen, 45, of Washington, D.C., isn't buying it. Now running her own consultancy, she works seven days a week by choice—but for 9-to-5ers, "I don't see how working on a Sunday is going to save your job," she says. "Just because your manager sees you working on Slack on a Sunday, what does that matter?"