Working time records in Spain: what the law requires and how to comply

Since 12 May 2019, every Spanish company with employees has had to record their working day, day by day. This is not a management best practice: it is a legal duty with a penalty regime behind it. And it is a different duty from knowing how many hours a project consumed, which is what many agencies think they are doing when they set up a clock-in system.

This guide pulls the two apart and goes through what the law actually asks for, article in hand.

What exactly does Article 34.9 of the Workers' Statute require?

Paragraph 9 of Article 34 of the consolidated Workers' Statute, or Estatuto de los Trabajadores (Royal Legislative Decree 2/2015), was inserted by Royal Decree-Law 8/2019 of 8 March and has applied since 12 May 2019. It carries three instructions, and they are worth reading one at a time.

1. The company guarantees a daily working time record. The employer is answerable for its existence. It is not on the employee to remember to write it down.
2. The record includes the specific start and finish time of the working day for each employee. Logging "eight hours" does not comply: the actual clock times are what the article asks for.
3. All of this without prejudice to flexible working hours. Recording is not the same as imposing a fixed schedule. A team with flexible start times keeps its flexibility; what changes is that the time it actually started is written down.

The law prescribes no particular system. It does not demand fingerprints, badges, a specific application or geolocation. It demands an outcome: every day worked has a start time and a finish time per person, and you can produce it on request.

Who does the obligation cover?

• Every employee, whatever their seniority or professional group. There is no carve-out for creative roles, for middle managers, or for people described as trusted staff. Note one distinction: "management" is not "senior management", and everyone else in a management role does clock in.
• Full-time and part-time contracts alike. For part-time work the requirement is older: Article 12.4.c of the Statute already requires the working day to be recorded daily, totalled monthly, a copy of the summary handed to the employee with their payslip, and those monthly summaries kept for at least four years.
• On-site and remote work. Article 14 of Law 10/2021 of 9 July on remote work points back to the Article 34.9 record and requires it to reflect faithfully the time spent on work, including when the working day starts and ends.
• With carve-outs: special employment relationships and their own regimes. Senior management (Article 2.1.a of the Statute, the special employment relationship of RD 1382/1985) is outside it, because Article 34 does not apply to them. And some sectors have their own working-time regime —road transport, merchant navy, rail (RD 1561/1995 and sector rules)— with their own recording requirements. If yours is one of them, check the specific rule before assuming the general regime.
• Not people who are not employees. A freelance who invoices the agency does not clock in, because they have no working day to record against it. Making them clock in is also a convenient way of documenting a relationship other than the one in the contract.

Who decides how the record is organised?

The article itself sets an order of priority, and it is not interchangeable: the unilateral decision is the fallback route, not the first one, and skipping ahead exposes you to having the validity of the system challenged.

1. Collective bargaining. If the applicable collective agreement regulates the record, the agreement governs.
2. Company-level agreement. Where the collective agreement is silent, the matter can be agreed within the company.
3. The employer's decision, after consulting the employees' legal representatives. This is the fallback route, not the first one, and it carries a prior consultation wherever such representation exists.

In practice: read the collective agreement before you shortlist any tool. It may set the system, how breaks are treated, how a copy of the record is handed over, or what happens with missing entries. No software fixes a setup that contradicts the agreement.

Article 34.9 says nothing explicit about breaks. If the collective agreement or a company agreement regulates them, the record has to be able to show them. And if you do record breaks, record them the same way for everyone: a different rule per person is precisely what turns a record into a liability.

How long must records be kept, and who can ask for them?

Four years. Throughout that period the records stay available to three parties: the employees themselves, their legal representatives, and the Labour and Social Security Inspectorate.

The interpretive guidance published by the Spanish Ministry of Labour in 2019 — an administrative criterion, not a rule — takes the view that records must be consultable immediately at the workplace. With a digital system that translates into something mundane: somebody in the company can open them and show them on the spot, without filing an export request with a vendor.

Two practical consequences that get forgotten:

• Switching tools does not cancel the duty. If you migrate, the previous four years still have to be readable. Export before you cancel anything.
• The record holds personal data. It is processed under a legal obligation, but that does not make it public inside the company: restrict who can read it using your tool's roles and permissions, instead of leaving a spreadsheet open to everyone.

What is the difference between a working time record and project time tracking?

This is the most common mix-up in an agency, and the reason many clock-in systems end up producing data that neither satisfies the law nor helps with pricing.

A working time record answers when a person starts and stops working. It is a legal obligation, its unit is the person and the day, and its ultimate reader may be an inspector.

Time tracking against projects answers how much time went into each task, project or client. No rule requires it: it is a management decision, and its unit is the work, not the person.

Making the two totals match is tempting, and it is a mistake. Someone can clock eight hours and book six: in between there are internal meetings, training, a client call that belonged to nobody, and the time it takes to get going. Force the totals to agree and people will pad until they do, which destroys the one figure that was useful, namely what a job really costs. Project profitability is calculated on that figure, and an inflated input gives an invented margin.

So keep the two apart, even inside the same tool. In Tasuki they are separate features: clock-in records the working day and time tracking books hours against tasks.

What about overtime?

That is a separate and older obligation. Article 35.5 of the Statute requires that, for the purpose of counting overtime, each person's working day be recorded day by day and totalled over the pay period, with a copy of the summary handed to the employee in the corresponding statement. There the delivery of a copy is spelled out.

Worth remembering too is the ceiling in Article 35.2 —eighty hours of overtime a year, not counting hours compensated with rest within the following four months— and the exception Article 35.2 itself makes for Article 35.3 hours, those worked to prevent or repair accidents and other extraordinary, urgent damage. That ceiling is reduced proportionally for anyone whose annual working time is below the company's standard, which is the case for many agency part-timers.

A daily record kept properly feeds both duties at once: it satisfies Article 34.9 and it lets you total overtime without reconstructing anything from memory.

What happens if there is no record?

The consolidated Law on Infringements and Penalties in the Social Order (Royal Legislative Decree 5/2000, known as the LISOS) classes breaches of legal or agreed rules on working time as a serious infringement in Article 7.5, and since the 2019 reform that provision names the working time record explicitly.

There are deliberately no figures here: amounts depend on how the infringement is graded and on the rules in force at the time, and a number written into a guide goes stale quietly. The classification is the part that matters.

There is also a less visible and often more expensive consequence. Without a record, the company has nothing to defend itself with: faced with a claim for unpaid hours, the courts have been holding that the party under a duty to document the working day is the party expected to produce the document. That is case-law, not a consequence the article itself spells out.

How do you roll this out in an agency without it getting in the way?

1. Read the applicable collective agreement. Before looking at any tool. It may already be telling you which system to use and how to document it.
2. Choose the system and document the decision. A company agreement, minutes of the consultation, or whatever the route you fall under requires.
3. Explain it to the team. What is recorded, what is not, who sees it, how long it is kept and what for. A clock-in nobody explained reads as surveillance, and fairly so.
4. Make clocking in one click from where people already work. If it means opening another app, another password and hunting for a button, the record will be filled in after the fact and stop being reliable.
5. Review exceptions weekly. Forgotten entries, missing clock-outs, days left open. Fixed the same week they take a minute; three months later nobody remembers what happened that Thursday.
6. Check that you can produce four years, including the years held by your previous provider.

If you are building the rest of the working system at the same time, sequence matters: project management first, hours after. Tracking time against tasks nobody maintains does not give you data, it gives you noise.

Which mistakes come up most often?

• Recording only a total number of hours. Without start and finish times, it does not comply.
• Clocking the contractual schedule. A record that repeats the contract's hours every single day documents nothing except that nobody is using it.
• Leaving it in a shared spreadsheet that anyone can rewrite without a trace.
• Excluding managers or trusted staff. The duty makes no distinction by seniority or professional group. The only real exception is senior management (RD 1382/1985), which is not the same as a team lead or an account director: those clock in.
• Using the record as a productivity metric. It is a working time compliance tool; turning it into a leaderboard is the fastest way to get the team to sabotage it.
• Confusing it with project time tracking and ending up with a figure that neither meets the law nor helps you quote.

Key points

• Article 34.9 of the Workers' Statute has required, since 12 May 2019, a daily record of the specific start and finish time of every employee's working day.
• Records are kept for four years and stay available to employees, their legal representatives and the Labour and Social Security Inspectorate.
• How the record is organised and documented is set by collective bargaining, by a company agreement, or failing those by the employer after consulting the legal representatives.
• The overtime record in Article 35.5 is a separate and older duty, with an express requirement to hand over a copy of the summary.
• Breaches of working time rules are classed as a serious infringement in Article 7.5 of the LISOS.
• Recording the working day and tracking hours against projects are different things: one is required by law, the other by your margin. Keep them apart and do not force them to agree.