Remote work: legal aspects and employment law

Service page: Employment lawyer: dismissals, wages and severance pay.

Your employer sent you home in 2020 without updating the contract. Since then you have worked from home, some of you fully, some in a hybrid model. What started as “temporary” became a permanent norm, but most employment contracts stayed in the old world. This opens the way to disputes that could have been prevented.

Which employment laws apply when you work from home?

All employment laws in Israel apply to remote employees exactly as they apply to employees in the office. The Hours of Work and Rest Law, the Wage Protection Law, the Employment (Equal Opportunities) Law, 5748-1988 (חוק שוויון ההזדמנויות בעבודה, התשמ״ח-1988): nothing has changed.

What has changed is the proof. When you work from home, it is harder to prove working hours, a work injury, and the separation between work time and personal time. That is why documentation is critical.

What must a remote work annex include?

Your old employment contract does not cover dozens of questions created by the change itself. A remote work annex should set out:

• the official place of work and the required hours of availability
• who provides equipment: a computer, an ergonomic chair, the internet
• covering expenses (electricity, the internet): whether, and in what form
• rules on privacy and data security at home

Without a written annex, a dispute will be decided by interpreting the contract and the circumstances of the employment, and what was not written down is harder to prove.

Does an email at 23:00 count as overtime?

A remote employee who answers emails at 23:00 and joins a Zoom call at 7:00 is building up overtime. The employer must pay overtime pay (at least 125% for the first two overtime hours in a day and 150% for every hour after them: section 16 of the Hours of Work and Rest Law) exactly as in the office.

“Availability” is not “work”. If you were required to be reachable but did not actually work, this is a gray area. But if you worked, you must be paid.

You were injured at home while working: who is responsible?

The National Insurance Institute recognizes accidents that happen at home in the course of actual work: an accident that happened to an employee in the course of work is deemed to have happened also because of the work, unless the contrary is proved (section 83 of the National Insurance Law [Consolidated Version], 5755-1995). A fall from a chair during a video call may therefore be recognized as a work injury. An injury on the way to the bathroom between two meetings is less clear: the law does not address this expressly, and the decision depends on the circumstances and on the case law of the Labor Court. The claim is filed with the National Insurance Institute, and the employee needs to show that the accident happened in the course of work.

Document your working hours on an ongoing basis: computer logs, meetings in your calendar, correspondence with colleagues. This is the basis on which a claim stands.

How far may the employer monitor you at home? The employer may monitor you, but within limits. Such monitoring involves an invasion of privacy, so it requires the employee’s informed consent (sections 1 and 3 of the Protection of Privacy Law, 5741-1981), and it must be proportionate and for a legitimate purpose. Especially intrusive measures, such as recording keystrokes or a continuous camera at home, raise real legal difficulty.

Who pays for the electricity, the internet and the chair?

No law expressly requires payment for electricity and the internet, and no general law requires equipment to be provided. A computer, peripheral equipment and sometimes an ergonomic chair are usually provided by the employer, especially when it was the employer who decided on working from home, and it is worth settling this in the annex. Deducting the cost of equipment from the employee’s wages is allowed only within the deductions in section 25 of the Wage Protection Law, for example a debt under a written undertaking, up to a quarter of the wages. As for electricity and the internet, it may be possible to argue for reimbursement of expenses on the basis of the principle of unjust enrichment, when the employer requires work from home and does not provide an alternative. This is an interpretive argument, and the outcome depends on the circumstances.

Are you entitled to travel expenses for days you work from home? As a rule, no. Under the Extension Order on Employer Participation in Travel Expenses to and from Work (צו ההרחבה בדבר השתתפות מעסיק בהוצאות נסיעה לעבודה וממנה) (Yalkut HaPirsumim 7319, 2016), the participation is paid for each day of actual work on which the employee used transport to get to their workplace, up to NIS 22.60 a day (sections 2 and 3 of the extended provisions; the amount was checked against Kol Zchut on 9 October 2026). On a day of work from home there is no such travel, so there is no reimbursement for it, unless otherwise agreed in the contract or the annex. The details: travel expenses to work.