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.
Daytime distractions push work to the weekend
Some Sunday workers say working weekends or after hours is the only way to get focused work done. During the workweek, "I get pulled in five different directions" with messages or requests from associates and higher-ups, Montanaro of Austin says.
Working a distraction-free Sunday can help workers get more done, says Frank Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs. But it can also be a signal that the typical Monday-through-Friday is overloaded with busywork.
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.
Workers carve out flexibility where they can
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 traditional Monday through Friday 9-to-5 time block.
Microshifting can be especially helpful to moms, caregivers and anyone who might need to duck out for a few hours on workdays. Kylie Gonzalez, 29, says she'll clock into her account manager job from home on a Sunday if she took some time during the week for doctor's appointments, school pickup for her kids or other events.
But she's wary of spending more than an hour or so working on the weekend, or making a habit of it. "Some companies may take advantage of that fact and add more to your plate because they see so much is being done," she says.
Job anxiety fuels the Sunday scaries
In 2019, the norm was going into the office on a Monday and getting settled for the week ahead, Weishaupt says. That prep work is now shifting to Sundays.
"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. Her weekend work helps her curb the Sunday scaries, she says: "If I just get ahead of it, I'm not as nervous about the week."
Dina Otero, 42, of Philadelphia, says she used to regularly log weekend hours, even spending her Sundays back from vacation catching up on emails before her actual return to work. Working a little extra at the start of the week would help her get ahead, she told herself. Really, it was just anxiety and "my own way of thinking that I had control over things that I really did not," she says.
In the current tough job market, when companies are signaling layoffs before they happen, hiring less and raising expectations around artificial intelligence, Weishaupt says Sunday work could also be a sign of overworking when people are worried about job security. 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.
That can become a big problem if unchecked. "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," Weishaupt says.
LaToya Allen, 45, in Washington, D.C., isn't sure the extra work hours are always worth it. She found herself in a burn-and-churn cycle in 2020, when she became disillusioned by her corporate tech job and what she saw as a false promise of success and security.
She now runs her own boutique tech consultancy and says working "pretty much seven days a week" comes with the territory of entrepreneurship. For 9-to-5 workers, though, "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?"
