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Working-time recording in Spain: what the law requires

What the Workers' Statute requires on working-time records, fines of 751 to 7,500 euros, what the digital draft proposes and how to do it well.

Héctor Redondo, CEO and founder of BAI Business CEO and founder of BAI Business

Published on Reviewed on 8 min Regulation

Contents
  1. What the law says today
  2. What failing to comply can cost
  3. What is coming: the digital record
  4. How to do it well from today
  5. What we have built at BAI
  6. What to do now
  7. How we checked this
  8. Sources

> Declaration of interest: BAI Business offers working-time recording and payroll and publishes this article. It is signed by Héctor Redondo, CEO and founder of BAI Business. This is not legal advice: confirm your case with your adviser or an employment lawyer.

Today I want to talk about recording working hours: what the law requires of a company that has employees, and how to do it without it turning into a pile of paper.

If you have someone on a contract, your company must guarantee a daily record of working time, with the exact time each person starts and finishes, and keep it for four years available to the staff, their representatives and the Labour Inspectorate (Workers' Statute, article 34.9). The law in force does not say which tool to use. There is a draft royal decree that would require the record to be digital; as of 10 October 2026 it has not been published in the BOE, Spain's official gazette.

What the law says today

Article 34.9 of the Workers' Statute, added by Royal Decree-law 8/2019 of 8 March, sets four things:

  • What is recorded: each day's working time, with the exact start and finish time of each worker.
  • How it is organised: by collective agreement or company agreement. If there is none, the company decides after consulting the workers' legal representatives.
  • How long it is kept: four years.
  • Who can see it: the workers, their legal representatives and the Labour and Social Security Inspectorate.

The obligation arises from having an employment relationship. If you work alone, with nobody on a contract, it does not affect you.

What failing to comply can cost

The Law on Offences and Sanctions in the Social Order treats as a serious offence breaching the rules on working time, rest, overtime and the "working time record" (article 7, paragraph 5). Serious offences carry a fine of 751 to 7,500 euros, split into three grades: 751 to 1,500 at the minimum, 1,501 to 3,750 at the medium and 3,751 to 7,500 at the maximum (article 40.1.b).

Besides the fine, there is an effect that does not depend on any inspection: with no record, when a person claims overtime, nobody can prove how much they worked, neither they nor you.

What is coming: the digital record

The Ministry of Labour has a draft royal decree on its public participation page that develops article 34.9. It is a draft: it may change, and until it is published in the BOE it binds nobody. This is what it proposes:

Point What the draft says
Medium A daily record of each worker's working time "by digital means"
Quality Objective, reliable and accessible. Reliable means that an entry, once made, cannot be changed without the authorisation of the company and of the worker, and that every change leaves a clear and indelible trace with its author
Minimum content Hour and minute of the start and end of the working day and of each break that is not working time, whether the work is on site or remote, ordinary, overtime and complementary hours, daily and monthly totals, and every change with who made it
How entries are made Each entry is made by the person themselves, freely, personally, directly and immediately, when starting and when finishing
If the system fails The record is made by another means and moved to a digital medium as soon as possible
Retention and access Four years; each person can consult and copy their entries at any time
Entry into force Twenty days after publication in the BOE

I reviewed the BOE daily summaries from 1 July to 10 October 2026 and no royal decree on working-time records appears.

How to do it well from today

You do not need to wait for the decree to do it properly. What I would do:

  1. Have each person record their own working time, when they start and when they finish, not you from memory at the end of the week.
  2. Record the breaks that do not count as work too. The law in force requires the start and end of the working day; the draft goes further and getting ahead of it is sensible.
  3. Make a change leave a trace: who did it, when, the original time and the reason. A record that can be touched up without anyone noticing is the one that defends you worst.
  4. Keep it for four years and know how to get it out: one file per month, per person, that you can show in minutes.
  5. Explain the system in writing to the staff and, if there are representatives, consult them first (article 34.9).
  6. Ask only for the data you need. If clocking in stores the location, decide whether you really need it and tell your team. The draft speaks of privacy and data protection under the principles of minimisation, suitability, necessity and proportionality.

Imagine a workshop with eight people that notes hours in a notebook in the office. One day a person claims two months of overtime and the notebook has crossings-out, undated pages and hours written by the foreman. Nobody knows what is true. With a record that each person makes on their own and that leaves a trace of every change, the conversation starts with data. (An invented example, not a real customer.)

What we have built at BAI

According to what we publish on our website, in BAI each person has an employee file, clocks in the start, the breaks and the end from their phone or computer, and you see live who is working. A missed entry is corrected by noting who changed it, the original time and the reason, and the daily record is downloaded as a PDF or a spreadsheet. You decide whether clocking in stores the location.

There is something I cannot tell you today: whether it will meet a royal decree that has not been published yet. When the final text exists, the table above is the list you should check any tool against, ours included.

What to do now

Look at how you record working time today and answer three questions: does each person note their own, would a change leave a trace, could you pull it out in five minutes if asked? If any answer is no, that is the first thing to fix. If you want to see how we do it, there is working-time recording and payroll. The time each person spends on each job is a different matter: that is measured in tasks and projects.

How we checked this

The text of article 34.9 and articles 7 and 40 of the law on offences and sanctions are the consolidated versions from the BOE, read on 11 October 2026 (both last updated on 3 October 2026). The draft is the document the Ministry of Labour has on its public participation page; I read its articles 1 to 6 and its entry into force on 11 October 2026 (the table summarises only that); it carries references to 2025 and is not the final text. To find out whether it had been published I went through the BOE daily summaries from 1 July to 10 October 2026 one by one (90 summaries read; the days without a summary could not be consulted) looking for "registro de jornada", "registro horario" and "tiempo de trabajo". What I say about BAI comes from the published page of the solution. I wrote it with the help of artificial intelligence from those sources; I sign it myself.

Sources

Regulation

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