Alessia Montanaro is closing out her second busy season of the year. Since September the 30-year-old public accountant in Austin, Texas, has been logging up to 60 hours a week, sometimes at her screen until 11 at night, and making a habit of working Sundays from her home office. She is not alone at her desk in the nation’s quiet hours. As Jennifer Liu reported for CNBC’s Make It, Sunday has become, for a great many office workers, the unofficial first day of the week.
Nearly half of workers often clock in on Sundays, according to a new 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 those surveyed said they work the whole or nearly the whole day; another 24% regularly put in a few hours.
Of the rest, 11% say they only glance at messages, 18% rarely do any work on Sundays, and 26% never do. It has been six years since the pandemic carried the office into the home, and showed that anywhere with Wi-Fi could be a workplace — and that every hour could be a working hour.
The machines keep the ledger. Chat messages sent outside the standard Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 workweek rose 15% year over year, to an average of 58 per user, according to Microsoft’s 2025 research into what it calls the rise of the “infinite workday.” Among weekend workers, nearly 20% check their email before noon on Saturday and Sunday, and more than 5% are back in their inboxes on Sunday nights, Microsoft found.
Weekdays No Longer Hold the Work
Some who labor on Sundays say it is the only time work can actually be done. During the week, Montanaro says, “I get pulled in five different directions” by messages and requests from associates and higher-ups. Frank Weishaupt, Owl Labs’ chief executive, allows that a distraction-free Sunday can be productive — but also that it may signal a Monday-to-Friday overloaded with busywork. Employees are interrupted roughly every two minutes during core hours by meetings, emails or chats, Microsoft data shows, and 38% of workers told Owl Labs they suffer meeting fatigue, most often complaining that meetings are too long and too many.
Flexibility, Borrowed and Feared
Weishaupt prefers a kinder reading: Sunday work, he says, can reflect “the employee’s desire for flexibility,” part of what Owl Labs has christened “microshifting” — labor done outside the traditional weeklong 9-to-5 block. It can suit mothers, caregivers, anyone who must step away for a few weekday hours. Kylie Gonzalez, 29, clocks into her account manager job from home on a Sunday when the week has been taken up by doctor’s appointments or school pickups. But she is careful to keep it to an hour or so, and to keep it rare. “Some companies may take advantage of that fact and add more to your plate because they see so much is being done,” she says.
Hugging the Job
In 2019, Weishaupt recalls, the norm was to arrive at the office on Monday and settle into the week; that preparation has migrated to Sunday. “My Sunday evening feels awful because I’m just thinking about Monday and all the work that I didn’t finish on Friday,” says Tobi Collins, 28, a strategy consultant in Dallas. Working ahead quiets the dread: “If I just get ahead of it, I’m not as nervous about the week.” Dina Otero, 42, of Philadelphia, once spent even her first Sundays back from vacation clearing email before her official return. She told herself it put her ahead; really, she says now, it was anxiety, “my own way of thinking that I had control over things that I really did not.”
The job market makes its own argument. With companies signaling layoffs in advance, hiring less and raising expectations around artificial intelligence, Weishaupt says Sunday work can be fear wearing the costume of diligence. Workers are “doing anything they can to hug that job, and that may mean that they’re just working a lot more, Sunday included,” he says. Left unchecked, he warns: “If 40 hours become 60 hours, you know you’re going to have burnout, you’re going to have frustration, and then when that pendulum swings the other way, you’re going to have a lot of churn.”
LaToya Allen, 45, in Washington, D.C., counts herself warned. In 2020 she found herself in a burn-and-churn cycle, disillusioned with a corporate tech job and what she came to see as a false promise of security. She now runs her own boutique tech consultancy, where working “pretty much seven days a week” is simply the territory of ownership. But for the 9-to-5 employee sweating over a laptop while the rest of the country rests, she is blunt: “I don’t see how working on a Sunday is going to save your job. Just because your manager sees you working on Slack on a Sunday, what does that matter?”