Next week’s roster lands on Thursday afternoon. Saturday’s shift starts at 6 pm and finishes after midnight. For plenty of shift workers, that’s a normal week. Where you work decides how often it happens.
To find out where shifts run longest, latest and with the least warning, we looked at 12 months of Deputy rostering and timesheet data, from September 2025 to August 2026.
It covers tens of millions of shifts worked by hundreds of thousands of shift workers on Deputy, comparing 85 regions on five measures: hours worked, shift length, evening and overnight work, weekend work and roster notice.
Some industries naturally run longer, later or more weekend shifts. A region full of hospitality and healthcare would top the raw numbers without anyone working unusually hard.
So each region is compared with what its own mix of industries would predict. A region ranks highly when its shift workers go further than their industries would usually expect.
Key takeaways
Outback Western Australia (South) is Australia’s hardest-working region. It scores 83.76 out of 100 on the Hardest-Working Index. Its shift workers on Deputy average 24% more hours a week than its industry mix predicts. A quarter of their hours (25.4%) are on evening and overnight shifts, nearly double what its industries predict.
Outback Western Australia and western Sydney lead the index. Outer South West Sydney (80.50), Western Australia’s Outback (North) (80.45), and Blacktown (78.92) follow first place.
Western Australia’s Outback (North) works the longest weeks and the longest shifts, even after allowing for industry mix. Its shift workers do 38% more hours a week than its industries predict, on shifts 12% longer.
Sydney’s Blacktown gets the least roster notice for its industries. Shifts are known 4.7 days ahead on average, 28% less than its industry mix predicts. Parramatta gets the least notice outright, at 3.8 days against 5.9 nationally.
Baulkham Hills and Hawkesbury in Sydney works the most weekends for their industries. That’s 23% more weekend work than its industry mix predicts. Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs has the highest weekend share outright, with 26.3% of shifts on a Saturday or Sunday against 20.1% nationally.
Launceston and North East is the least demanding region in the country. It has the lowest index score, at 14.45. Barossa - Yorke - Mid North (19.26) and Warrnambool and South West Victoria (19.59) follow.
Australia’s hardest-working regions
Outback Western Australia (South) tops the Hardest-Working Index with a score of 83.76 out of 100. Shift workers on Deputy here average 32.3 hours a week, which is 24% more than the region's mix of industries predicts. Evening and overnight work is where it pulls ahead.
A quarter of all hours (25.4%) fall on evening and overnight shifts, almost double what its industries would predict (+95%). Weekend shifts make up 18.3% of the total, 12% above expected. Roster notice averages 8.7 days, which is 24% less than expected.
Outer South West Sydney is second on 80.50, making it the hardest-working major-city region. Shift workers on Deputy here average 19.3 hours a week, 12% more than expected, on shifts averaging 7.2 hours, 9% longer than expected.
They also do 14% more weekend work than the region's industries predict and get 17% less roster notice. In fact, Greater Sydney takes three of the top seven, with Blacktown in fourth (78.92) and Inner South West Sydney in seventh (71.35).
Outback Western Australia (North) ranks third, on 80.45. Shift workers on Deputy here average 42 hours a week, which is 38% more than its industry mix predicts.
Shifts average 10.3 hours, 12% longer than expected. Almost a third of hours (32.2%) are on evening and overnight shifts, 48% above expected.
No region in Victoria, South Australia or Tasmania makes the top ten. South Australia's highest is West Adelaide, 16th on 59.55. Victoria's highest is Mornington Peninsula, 27th on 55.67.
The least demanding regions
At the other end of the index, the pattern is fewer late shifts and more warning. Launceston and North East have the lowest score, at 14.45 out of 100 (85th of 85). Its share of evening and overnight work is 51% below what its industry mix predicts, and its shifts are 12% shorter than expected.
Victoria has four of the bottom ten, with Shepparton and Inner East Melbourne joining Warrnambool and Latrobe - Gippsland. All three of Tasmania’s published regions are there too: Launceston and North East, Hobart, and West and North West.
A low score isn’t a judgement on effort, either. Fewer hours or less evening work can reflect the work available in a region, not the choices of the people doing it.
Australia’s hardest-working regions, measure by measure
Hours worked
Outback Western Australia (North) works the longest weeks. Its shift workers on Deputy put in 38% more hours a week than its industries predict, averaging 42 hours. Central Queensland (+26%), Outback Western Australia (South) (+24%) and Toowoomba (+22%) are next.
Shift length
The average shift for shift workers on Deputy runs 6.9 hours. When allowing for industry mix, Western Australia Outback (North) has the longest shifts. They average 10.3 hours, 12% longer than its industries predict.
Outright, that’s 50% longer than the national average. Blacktown in Sydney (7.4 hours) and Darwin (7.3 hours) are next, both 10% longer than expected. After that, this measure belongs to the cities. Nine of the top ten are capital-city regions, and six of them are in Greater Sydney.
Evening and overnight work
Shifts that start between 6 pm and 5:59 am account for 13.1% of hours worked by shift workers on Deputy. Outback Western Australia (South) does the most evening and overnight work.
A quarter of its hours (25.4%) fall on these shifts, 95% more than its industry mix predicts. West Adelaide (+54%), Ipswich (+53%) and Riverina (+51%) are next.
Weekend work
One in five shifts worked by shift workers on Deputy (20.1%) falls on a Saturday or Sunday. Allowing for industry mix, Baulkham Hills and Hawkesbury in Sydney works the most weekends. Its weekend share is 20.6% of shifts, only just above the national figure, but that’s 23% more than its industries predict.
Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs is second (+15%) and has the highest weekend share outright, at 26.3% of shifts. North East Perth and Sydney’s Outer South West are next, both 14% above expected. That gives Sydney three of the top four.
Roster notice
Shift workers on Deputy get an average of 5.9 days’ notice of a shift. Allowing for industry mix, Sydney’s Blacktown gets the least notice. Shifts are known 4.7 days ahead on average, 28% less than its industries predict.
Mackay, Isaac and Whitsunday is a close second, also 28% below expected. Its 10 days is well above the national average, but its industries usually give even more notice, so it still ranks near the top. Parramatta in Sydney is third (-25%) and gets the least notice outright, at 3.8 days. That’s 35% below the national average.
Hardest-working regions by industry
This section compares like with like. Each industry in a region is scored on the same index, measured against that same industry nationally. Hospitality is compared with hospitality, and retail with retail.
Hospitality: Parramatta, Sydney
Parramatta in Sydney is the hardest-working region for hospitality, scoring 74.81. Hospitality workers on Deputy there average 25% more hours a week than hospitality nationally. Their shifts run 12% longer, and they get 15% less roster notice.
Retail: North East Perth
Perth’s North East leads retail on 84.11. Retail workers on Deputy there average 25.9 hours a week, 53% more than retail nationally. Their weekend share is 29% above retail nationally, and they get 23% less roster notice.
Healthcare: Outer South West Sydney
Sydney’s Outer South West leads healthcare with the highest score in this section, 90.05. Healthcare workers on Deputy there average 27.1 hours a week, 64% more than healthcare nationally. They work 19.9% of their shifts on weekends, more than twice the national healthcare share of 9.4%. They also get half the roster notice.
Services: Outback Northern Territory
Northern Territory’s Outback leads services on 78.93. Services workers on Deputy work shifts 35% longer than services nationally. They do 28% more of their hours on evening and overnight shifts, 28% more weekend work, and get 20% less roster notice.
Hardest-working regions by state
New South Wales
Sydney’s Outer South West is the hardest-working region in New South Wales, scoring 80.50, and second in the country. All five of the state’s top regions are in Greater Sydney, and all five are in the national top 14. Blacktown (78.92, 4th) and Inner South West Sydney (71.35, 7th) come next, followed by Parramatta (63.95, 13th) and Outer West Sydney and Blue Mountains (61.93, 14th).
Roster notice is short across all five. Blacktown gets 28% less than its industry mix predicts, the largest shortfall of any region. Parramatta gets the least notice outright, at 3.8 days. Parramatta’s week also looks a little different from the rest. Its shift workers do 49% more evening and overnight work than its industry mix predicts, but 32% less weekend work.
Victoria
Mornington Peninsula is the hardest-working region in Victoria, scoring 55.67 and ranking 27th nationally. It does 10% more weekend work than its industry mix predicts, with 22.8% of shifts falling on a Saturday or Sunday.
Melbourne’s North West (55.31) works the longest weeks of the state’s top five. Its shift workers on Deputy average 20.9 hours a week, 12% more than its industry mix predicts. Melbourne’s West (53.49) gets 11% less roster notice than expected. Inner Melbourne (44.51) and Geelong (43.44) complete the top five.
Victoria’s highest-ranked region sits lower nationally than the top region in any other mainland state. Across the five measures, Victoria's shift workers on Deputy mostly work at or below what their industries would predict.
Queensland
Logan - Beaudesert is the hardest-working region in Queensland, scoring 69.52 and ranking 8th nationally. Shift workers on Deputy there do 43% more evening and overnight work than its industry mix predicts and work 14% more hours a week.
All five of Queensland’s top regions are in the national top 12. Brisbane’s East (68.38, 9th) and Cairns (65.03, 10th) come next, followed by Gold Coast (64.52, 11th) and Brisbane’s South (64.37, 12th).
Late shifts are what the five have in common. Each does at least 18% more evening and overnight work than its industry mix predicts. Cairns works the longest weeks of the five, with 18% more hours than its industry mix predicts. Meanwhile, Brisbane’s South gets 21% less roster notice than expected.
Western Australia
Outback Western Australia (South) is the hardest-working region in the country and of course the state, followed by Outback (North), which ranked third nationally.
After the outback, there’s a big gap. Perth’s three highest-ranked regions are South West (52.91, 32nd), Inner (51.77, 35th) and North East (49.84, 37th). The North East gets 20% less roster notice than its industry mix predicts and does 14% more weekend work. It also leads the country for retail.
South Australia
Adelaide’s West is the hardest-working region in South Australia, scoring 59.55 and ranking 16th nationally. Evening and overnight work is what puts it there. Shift workers on Deputy do 18% of their hours on these shifts, 54% more than its industry mix predicts and the second-highest in the country on that measure.
Adelaide’s North is second in the state (56.62, 23rd nationally). Workers here also do more evening and overnight work than expected, at 38% above what its industries predict.
The rest of the state’s top five sit in the bottom third nationally. They are Adelaide Central and Hills (39.41, 60th), South East South Australia (35.87, 65th) and Adelaide’s South (32.82, 73rd).
Emma Seymour, Chief Financial Officer, at Deputy comments:
“Every region faces a different staffing reality. The data is not a measure of how hard people work. It shows how work is organised, and where businesses have an opportunity to make their operations run better for both their people and their bottom line.
In outback Western Australia, businesses are managing longer working weeks and more evening shifts than similar businesses elsewhere. In the north of the region, rosters are generally published well in advance. That matters. When someone is working a long shift, having nearly two weeks’ notice gives them more certainty and gives the business a better chance of having the right people in place.
Western Sydney is a different picture. Shifts are shorter, but people often receive very little notice. In Blacktown, workers get 28% less notice than we would expect for those industries, while Parramatta averages less than four days. That can make it harder for employees to manage childcare, study or a second job, and can leave businesses relying on costly last-minute changes when demand or availability shifts.
For business owners and managers, the answer is not simply to schedule more hours. It is to plan earlier and use the information already available to build a more reliable roster. Publishing shifts even a few days sooner can reduce last-minute swaps, improve coverage and help teams plan their lives. It is also important to look at who is regularly covering evening and overnight shifts, so the load does not keep falling on the same people.
Forecasting can help businesses make those decisions with more confidence. Deputy labour demand forecasting shows expected demand and labour percentage day by day, then compares the forecast with what actually happened. That helps managers see where staffing and demand did not line up, build rosters around expected trade, maintain minimum coverage and stay within budget."
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About the data
- Background
Our Hardest-Working Regions study ranks 85 regions across Australia on how demanding shift work is there. Rather than asking people how hard they work, we read it from what actually happened: our own rostering and timesheet data, covering tens of millions of shifts worked by hundreds of thousands of shift workers on Deputy over a full year, from 1 September 2025 to 30 August 2026. Using a full year evens out seasonal and holiday differences between places and industries.
We look at five parts of the working week: how many hours people work, how long their shifts run, how much of their work falls in the evening and overnight, how much falls on weekends, and how much notice they get of their shifts. Each region is compared with what its mix of industries would predict, so a region doesn't rank highly just because it has more of the industries that naturally run long, late or weekend shifts. The five results are then combined, with equal weight, into a Hardest-Working Index scored from 0 to 100, from which we rank the regions and break them down by state, area type, capital city and industry.
The data is anonymised and aggregated, so no business or worker can be identified, and every average is a mean.
- What we measured
We measure five things for each region, each describing a different part of how demanding shift work is:
Weekly hours per worker: total hours worked in the region each week, divided by the average number of active employees there. Active employees are everyone on the books at a business using Deputy on a given day, including part-time and casual staff and people with no shift that week.
Average shift length: total hours worked divided by the number of shifts worked.
Evening and overnight work: the share of hours worked on shifts that start between 6pm and 5:59am.
Weekend work: the share of shifts worked on a Saturday or Sunday.
Roster notice: the average number of days between the last change to a shift's roster and the start of the shift, weighted by the number of rostered shifts. Less notice counts as more demanding.
- Which regions we included
Regions are the ABS's Statistical Areas Level 4 (SA4s) from the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 3. We match each workplace's postcode to an SA4 (a postcode that crosses a boundary goes to the SA4 where most of its workplace areas sit), so regions describe where the work happens, not where workers live: someone who commutes, or flies in and out, is counted where they work. Not every workplace has a location on record. We don't estimate missing locations, and every regional and national average is based on the shifts we can place. To make sure each result rests on enough activity, a region is included only if it has at least 800 active employees on an average day and at least 200 businesses working shifts. Eighty-five of Australia's 88 SA4s meet both thresholds.
- How the Hardest-Working Index is calculated
Some industries naturally run longer, later or more weekend-heavy shifts than others, so a region full of them would top the raw figures even if its workers did nothing unusual for their industry. The index therefore compares each region with what its mix of industries would predict.
For each measure, we calculate an expected figure: the value the region would have if each of its industries matched that industry's national average, using Deputy's 46 detailed industry categories (such as cafés, hospitals and gyms). We then measure how far above or below that figure the region actually is, as a percentage ("vs expected for industry mix"). Three unclassified catch-all categories (Services Other, All Other and Not Applicable) have no defined business type, so they can't be compared like for like and are left out. Roster notice is reversed, so less notice than expected scores higher.
Each measure is scaled from 0 to 100. A region at the 5th percentile of the 85 regions scores 5, a region at the 95th percentile scores 95, and scores in between are proportional. Regions beyond those points are compressed into the outer five points, so extreme regions keep their order and no region scores exactly 0 or 100.
The index is the average of the five scores, with equal weights (20% each), as there is no objective basis for treating one measure as more important than another.
Scores and the index are rounded to two decimal places, and regions are ranked from 1 (hardest-working) to 85 (least demanding).
The rankings for each measure are also based on "vs expected for industry mix", with the raw figure shown alongside, so a region with a lower raw figure can rank above one with a higher raw figure.
We also break the results down in four ways:
Area type: each region takes the ABS Remoteness Area category (2021) where most of its residents live, using Census 2021 mesh block counts. The groups are major cities (50 regions), inner regional (22), and outer regional and remote (13). Regions keep their national index score and are ranked within their group.
Capital city and rest of state: for New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia, we compare each Greater Capital City Statistical Area with the rest of the state, calculated the same way and scored on the same scale as the regions. Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory are not split, because of small samples outside the capitals.
By state: every region in each state and territory, ranked within it using the national index.
By industry: within each region, we compare each of Deputy's broad industries (healthcare, hospitality, retail, services and other) with the same industry nationally, on the same five measures, scaled from 0 to 100 in the same way. An industry is scored in a region only if it has at least 250 active employees on an average day and at least 50 businesses there.
- How we tested the results
We tested the results in four ways. Recalculating the index with each measure left out, or with each measure's weight doubled, kept the four highest-ranked regions in the top six and the five lowest in the bottom nine every time. We recalculated each region's figures without its largest postcode, to check whether any result rests on a single locality. We compared Deputy's coverage in each region with ABS Census 2021 employment by place of work; because every measure is an average or a share, differences in coverage don't change a region's figures. And we checked our weekly hours against ABS hours worked in the same industries: ours run lower, as expected, because they include workers on the books who had no shift that week.
- Where the data comes from
Deputy rostering and timesheet data, 1 September 2025 to 30 August 2026, from businesses that started using Deputy before 2026
Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 3: SA4s, Greater Capital City Statistical Areas, postal areas and mesh blocks (2021 boundaries).
Australian Bureau of Statistics, ASGS Edition 3 Remoteness Structure, with Census 2021 Mesh Block Counts: area types.
Australian Bureau of Statistics, Census of Population and Housing 2021, Working Population Profile (DataPacks): employment by industry and place of work, for the coverage check.
Australian Bureau of Statistics, Labour Force, Australia, Detailed, March 2026 (table EQ11): hours actually worked by industry, for the hours check.
- Limitations
The study covers businesses that use Deputy, which lean towards hospitality, retail and healthcare. It includes only businesses that started using Deputy before 2026, so those that joined partway through the study year aren't counted. Findings describe shift workers on Deputy and how their regions compare, not every worker in a region.
Regional figures rest on shifts from workplaces with a recorded location, just over half of all shifts. The unplaced shifts look similar on the checks we can run, but we can't confirm they match in every respect.
Weekly hours include people without shifts. Because hours are averaged over everyone on the books, the figure partly reflects how much work each person gets, as well as how long they work. It shouldn't be compared with a full-time working week or with ABS hours worked.
Only anonymised, aggregated totals are provided, so every figure is a mean.
Regions are based on the workplace's postcode. Workers who commute or fly in and fly out are counted where they work, and the data can't say why a region's patterns differ, for example because of fly-in fly-out rosters.
The comparison relies on the industry each business selects in Deputy, which describes the business rather than each worker's role. It can't adjust for differences within a category, and the unclassified catch-all categories are left out.
- Disclaimer
This study is based on aggregated, de-identified data from Deputy's platform and is provided for general information only. Figures describe shift workers on Deputy at workplaces with a recorded location between September 2025 and August 2026, and may differ from official statistics. While we have taken care to ensure the analysis is accurate, it shouldn't be relied on as the sole basis for business, employment or policy decisions.