Twelve years of fatigue guidance just became a code, and it reads shift rosters in hard numbers

Fatigue was always a duty. Now it has a code.

The duty itself is not new. Under section 19 of the WHS Acts, a PCBU must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that workers are not exposed to risks to their physical and psychological health, and the new code opens by saying plainly that this includes the risk of fatigue. What changed is the instrument. From 2013 the national reference was Safe Work Australia's Guide for managing the risk of fatigue at work, which is guidance and nothing more. A model code of practice sits a rung higher: codes are admissible in court proceedings as evidence of what is known about a hazard and what is reasonably practicable to control it, per Safe Work Australia's model laws hub. The draft went to public consultation in October 2024; the finished code is dated September 2025 and was announced on 13 November 2025 alongside worker and small business fact sheets.

The definition is broader than tiredness. The code defines fatigue as a state of physical, mental or emotional impairment, and is explicit that in a work context it is more than feeling sleepy: it degrades coordination and strength, decision making and concentration, and the ability to regulate emotions. It also quantifies the stakes. The code cites studies showing that being awake for 17 hours affects cognitive and motor performance similarly to a blood alcohol content of 0.05 per cent, and 24 hours awake similarly to 0.10, and cites World Health Organization and International Labour Organization findings that working 55 or more hours a week is associated with an estimated 35 per cent higher risk of stroke and 17 per cent higher risk of ischaemic heart disease than a 35 to 40 hour week.

The roster patterns the code names as hazards

Work-hours and shift-design hazards named in the model fatigue code (chapter 3.1), with the code's own thresholds. The code's hazard tables are examples, not exhaustive lists.

The controls chapter carries matching numbers. Where reasonably practicable, work should not start before 6 am or end after 10 pm; where night work cannot be avoided, the code says not to roster more than three successive night shifts, to use forward rotation (day to afternoon to night, not backwards), and to give at least 24 hours' notice so workers can adjust sleep. Workers should get a 30 minute break at least every five hours, at least one full day off a week, no more than five days in a row, and at least 12 hours between shifts. Where fatigue risk is high, the code says to consider restricting shifts to eight hours. None of these figures is a legal maximum in itself; each is the code's stated benchmark for what managing the risk looks like, which is exactly what makes a code hard to argue with after an incident.

What a roster agreement cannot do

The code puts one point in a box of its own: a PCBU's duty is not removed or reduced by hours set in employment contracts, enterprise agreements or awards or a worker's preference for certain shift patterns, or willingness to work extra hours or to come to work when fatigued, and is not mitigated by what the worker is paid. A volunteer for every double shift is still a fatigue risk the business must manage. The code also treats workers as being "at work" whenever they are doing work for the PCBU, including answering after-hours contact, and flags that eligible employees now hold a right to disconnect in some circumstances. Officers, for their part, owe the section 27 due diligence duty: the code names collecting the information needed to identify whether unsafe hours are actually being worked as part of it.

Shift work is also where this code and the 2022 psychosocial hazards code interlock. The fatigue code's inter-relation note says fatigue can create or worsen psychosocial hazards, including high work demands, poor support and harmful behaviours, and that PCBUs hold specific duties for psychosocial risks under the WHS Regulations, the territory covered in our psychosocial code story. The July 2025 healthcare and social assistance code works the same ground with a worked example: a nurse rostered past 240 hours a month on backward-rotating shifts, answered with a documented safe-hours policy of forward rotation, capped night shifts and minimum days off. That example is the code's own illustration, not a real case, but it is the pattern regulators now hold up as the fix.

What binds today, and what to do about it

Like every model code, this one binds nobody until a jurisdiction approves it under its own WHS Act, and jurisdictions adopt model codes on their own timetables. The section 19 duty to manage fatigue risk applies everywhere already; the code is the clearest statement yet of what discharging it looks like for shift work, and some industries carry extra fatigue-specific law on top (the code names heavy vehicle, rail, civil aviation, offshore oil and gas, mining and maritime). The practical move for a shift-running operator is to read your roster against the table above before an inspector or a court does: count the successive nights, the hours between shifts, the notice given, and whether anyone can honestly take a break every five hours.

Which jurisdictions have actually approved it, as far as we can establish

That advice to check your own regulator is correct, and it is also the least useful sentence on this page, so on 18 August 2026 we went and checked. Safe Work Australia does not publish a central list: its own Codes of Practice page says To determine if a model Code of Practice has been approved in a particular jurisdiction, check with your local WHS regulator. That means a separate register for each jurisdiction. Victoria is not one of them, because it runs its own OHS Act and a model code has no path into Victorian law, so there are eight registers that could approve this code, and we have read five.

Read “not established” as exactly that. It is not evidence either way, and a jurisdiction in that row may well have approved the code.

If you roster shift work in NSW, the position changed on 20 February 2026. The code is approved under section 274 of the NSW Work Health and Safety Act, which means a court may have regard to it as evidence of what is known about fatigue risk, and an inspector may refer to it when issuing an improvement or prohibition notice. The thresholds set out above are no longer only a national reference document in NSW. They are the standard your roster is measured against.

Everywhere else, the section 19 duty still applies and the code still describes the best available statement of how to discharge it. The difference approval makes is evidential, not the existence of the duty.