Is time recording (registro de jornada) mandatory in Spain and what must it include?

Who has to comply

Article 34.9 of the Spanish Workers' Statute (Estatuto de los Trabajadores) applies to all companies, with no exemption by size or sector: a café with two waiters has exactly the same obligation as a hotel chain. It covers every employee, including part-time staff (who already had to log their hours before 2019), remote workers and those on flexible hours.

What the record must include

• The exact start and finish time of each day's work, for every employee. Writing “8 hours” or a theoretical rota is not enough.
• If the company organises it this way or the collective agreement (convenio colectivo) requires it, also any breaks that don't count as working time (for example, lunch).
• It must be reliable and tamper-proof: if an entry is corrected, it must be clear who changed it, when and why.

How long to keep it and who can ask for it

Records must be kept for four years and be available to the employees themselves, their legal representatives and the Labour Inspectorate (Inspección de Trabajo). During an inspection you will usually be asked for several months' records, on the spot.

Is a paper timesheet enough?

At present the law doesn't require a specific system, but paper has three problems: it gets lost, it tends to be filled in at the end of the week (so it doesn't reflect reality) and it leaves no trail of corrections. On top of that, the Government is preparing a Royal Decree (real decreto) to make digital time recording compulsory. The safest approach is to switch now to a digital system that doesn't allow clock-ins to be deleted.

Common mistakes

• Recording only the “official” schedule rather than the hours actually worked.
• Not recording staff who work from home or off-site.
• Filling in or “tidying up” the record days later.
• Being unable to hand it over when an employee or the Inspectorate asks for it.

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