Slack After Hours Status: Working Hours, Messages and Examples

After hours in Slack is an automatic status. When your working hours end, Slack puts 🕰️ After hours in your status and pauses your notifications, so people can see a reply may wait until morning. To turn it on, click your profile picture, open Preferences, then Availability, set your hours under Working hours, and tick After hours for after working hours under Automatic statuses. If you want your own words instead, set a status such as "🌙 Offline for the day, back 9am ET"; Slack does not replace a status you set yourself.

This page is about your own status. If you searched for whether Slack itself is down, that is Slack's system status page at status.slack.com.

What we saw when working hours ended

We turned the setting on in our test workspace on 6 October 2026 at 16:56, four minutes before the end of its working hours (Weekdays, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM):

After 17:00 our profile menu showed the 🕰️ After hours status, a green dot with a small z labelled Active, and Notifications: Paused:

Three things the help center does not tell you:

• • It does not change your dot. We were still Active, because a Slack window was open. The z only means notifications are paused, as explained in what a green dot with a Z means.
• • Apps cannot read it. At the same moment, Slack's users.profile.get and users.info API calls returned an empty status_text and status_emoji for us. A bot or script that reads statuses sees no After hours status.
• • It never overrides your own status. The setting says so: "If you already have a status set, Slack won't change it." Unticking the box removed the After hours status from the menu straight away.

What coworkers see after your working hours

Slack has three separate signals, and after hours you want all three to say the same thing:

• • Your dot. Green when Slack counts you as active, away 10 minutes after your last keyboard or mouse input on desktop. The timer is covered in how long does Slack stay active.
• • The snooze icon. Shown while your notifications are paused, including outside the working hours you set.
• • Your status. The emoji next to your name and the text people see when they hover over it.

When someone sends you a DM while your notifications are paused, Slack's help center says they can override the pause to notify you about something urgent, once per day. Add people you always want to hear from to your VIP list instead.

How to set your working hours in Slack

On desktop:

• Click your profile picture in the sidebar and select Preferences.
• Below Working hours, open the Allow notifications menu and pick Every day, Weekdays or Custom.
• Choose a start and end time. The setting saves on its own.
• Under Automatic statuses, tick After hours for after working hours.

On mobile, tap your profile picture, tap Notifications, then Allow notifications below Notification schedule. If an admin set a default schedule for the workspace, yours overrides it. The same setting appears as the Do Not Disturb schedule in older guides; Slack Do Not Disturb covers pausing by hand and the /dnd commands.

Set your time zone first, or your hours will be off by the difference; see how to change your time zone in Slack.

After hours status examples

Put the time you will be back in the text, with your time zone if the team spans several. Choose Remove status after so an evening status does not sit there all of the next morning. For more wording, try the Slack status generator, and check a teammate's hours before you ping them with the Slack time zone converter.

After hours etiquette for the sender

Most after-hours friction comes from the person sending the message, not the one receiving it.

Team norms for statuses, such as what "away" means and how fast people reply, are in Slack status etiquette.

Set the same status every evening with a script

Slack can schedule up to five statuses ahead, but it cannot repeat one every day. If you want "🌙 Offline for the day" every weekday at 6pm, a short script can set it through the Web API with a user token that has the users.profile:write scope:

# pip install slack_sdk
# Run at 18:00 on weekdays, for example with cron: 0 18 * * 1-5 python after_hours.py
import os, time
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from slack_sdk import WebClient

client = WebClient(token=os.environ["SLACK_USER_TOKEN"])  # xoxp- token with users.profile:write

tomorrow_9am = (datetime.now() + timedelta(days=1)).replace(hour=9, minute=0, second=0, microsecond=0)
client.users_profile_set(profile={
    "status_text": "Offline for the day, back 9am ET",
    "status_emoji": ":crescent_moon:",
    "status_expiration": int(tomorrow_9am.timestamp()),
})
print("status set until", tomorrow_9am)

status_expiration is a Unix timestamp, and Slack clears the status at about that time. In our test on 6 October 2026, a status set through this API call with an expiration 150 seconds ahead cleared 27 seconds early, so leave a minute of margin if the exact time matters. Other ways to repeat a status, such as a recurring calendar event with calendar sync, are in how to schedule a Slack status.

FAQ

How do I show I'm offline after hours in Slack? Set your working hours in Preferences so notifications pause outside them, and add a status such as "Offline for the day, back 9am".

Can people still message me after hours? Yes. Messages arrive, but you are not notified. A DM sender can override the pause once a day for something urgent.

What status should I use when working late? Something like "🌇 Working late on the release, DM if blocked", set to clear after a few hours.