To ask your employer for permission to moonlight, send a short written note to your manager, or to HR if your policy names HR, that says what the side work is, how many hours it takes, when you do it and that it stays clear of the company’s clients, competitors, equipment and confidential information. Ask for the answer in writing and keep it.
Most requests for a few hours of unrelated evening work get a yes. The ones that stall are usually vague, so the reviewer has to guess, and guesses in a conflict review tend toward no. The note below answers the questions before anyone asks them. For whether you need to ask at all, start with what is moonlighting.
Read your policy before you write a word
The policy tells you whether to ask, whom to ask and on which form. Look in three places: the employee handbook (search for “outside employment”, “outside activities”, “moonlighting” or “conflict of interest”), your employment contract or offer letter, and the code of conduct.
Policies fall into roughly four kinds:
- Outside work is allowed with no step required.
- Outside work must be disclosed, but no approval is needed.
- Outside work needs approval before it starts, often on a form.
- Outside work is banned, sometimes with exceptions for teaching or volunteering.
If the policy asks only for disclosure, send the same note anyway and call it a disclosure. If it bans outside work, the note becomes a request for an exception, and it should say why the work raises none of the concerns the ban exists for.
Answer the four questions any reviewer asks
A reviewer checks whether the side work competes with the company, uses its time, uses its equipment or exposes its information. Your note should answer each one in a sentence.
- What is the work, and who is it for? Name the platform or company and describe the task in plain words: “grading AI answers to math questions”, “translating product descriptions from Spanish”.
- How many hours, and when? Give a weekly figure and the times: “about five hours a week, on weekday evenings and Saturday mornings”.
- Does it touch the company’s business? Say whether the other company is a competitor, client or supplier, and whether the work relates to your job.
- What will you use? Say you will use your own computer, your own accounts and no information you learned in confidence at work.
Leave out what the side job pays and why you want the money. Neither is part of a conflict review, and both invite questions unrelated to the decision.
A short note can answer all four questions
Keep it under 150 words, so it gets read and answered the same day.
Hi Dana,
I’d like to take on some part-time remote work outside my hours here, and I want to check it fits our outside employment policy.
The work is reviewing and writing answers for an AI training project run by [platform]. It has no connection to our clients, competitors or products. It takes about five hours a week, on weekday evenings and weekend mornings, outside my working hours.
I’ll do it on my own laptop and my own accounts, and I won’t use anything from my work here.
Could you confirm in writing that this is fine, or tell me if HR needs a form? Happy to talk it through.
Thanks, Sam
If your policy has a form, fill in the form and attach or paste the same text. If your role is close to the side work, for example a developer asking about coding projects, add one sentence on why the work doesn’t overlap: “The project reviews Python answers for general learners and doesn’t touch our payments product.”
Government, university and finance jobs use a set process
In regulated jobs, the request goes on a form to an ethics or compliance office, and approval comes before the work starts. Many federal agencies require prior written approval for outside employment under their supplemental ethics rules. Registered brokers give their firm written notice of outside business activity under FINRA Rule 3270. Universities often ask staff to report outside activities on a yearly conflict-of-interest disclosure, and medical residents ask their program director, since moonlighting hours count toward duty-hour limits.
The four answers above still belong in the form. Expect an ethics or compliance review to take longer than a manager’s reply, and don’t start the side work until it comes back.
Send it to the right person, at the right time
Ask before you sign up, not after your first paid week. Approval after the fact is still better than none, but a request that arrives after the work started reads as a confession, and some policies treat unapproved outside work as a breach on its own.
Send the note to your direct manager unless the policy names HR, compliance or an ethics office. Copy HR when the policy mentions it. A manager who approves verbally is not the end of it: reply with a short email that sums up what was agreed, so the record exists.
A good time is a calm week, not the day after a missed deadline. A request lands better when the reviewer has no reason to connect it with your workload.
A no or a conditional yes tells you what to change
A conditional yes is the most common answer to a careful request. Typical conditions are a cap on weekly hours, a ban on a named competitor, or a rule that the work stays off company devices. Agree in writing and keep to them.
If the answer is no, ask what the concern is. Sometimes it is one detail you can change: a platform that also works for a client, a field too close to your job, or a project that wants more hours than you described. A different kind of work, such as language projects or writing projects, often clears the same review.
If the answer is a flat no, you know where you stand, and you can weigh the side income against the job with full information. Working anyway after a refusal is the one path that gives an employer a clean reason to fire you, covered in can you get fired for moonlighting?
Keep the approval current
An approval covers the work you described, so ask again when the work changes. New platform, new kind of task, more hours, a promotion that moves you closer to the side work’s field, or a new manager: each is a reason to send a two-line update.
Save each approval outside your work email, for example as a PDF in your personal files. If you leave the company, the record shows you followed the policy, which matters in any later dispute about who owns what you made.
Start small after the yes. A few hours a week in side jobs under 10 hours shows you how the work fits around the day job before you take on more.
