The motivation to exert effort is fundamental to health, productivity, and well-being. From navigating life’s challenges to completing everyday tasks, human behaviour is continually shaped by decisions about when and how much effort to invest. This chapter presents a neuroeconomic framework for understanding effort-based decision-making, integrating research from psychology, neuroscience, and behavioural economics. We outline how effort unfolds across distinct phases: identifying what options are available, choosing whether to act, sustaining effort during a task, and learning from the outcomes. We review key empirical findings and theoretical models conceptualising effort as a multidimensional, dynamic, and context-sensitive cost. At the neural level, we highlight the role of dopamine-driven fronto-striatal circuits in representing the subjective value of effort and explore how disruptions to these processes may contribute to motivational impairments in clinical and non-clinical populations. Finally, we identify future directions for interdisciplinary research into the mechanisms and dynamics of motivation, offering an integrative framework for understanding how and why we work.