Spain’s working-time record: what is mandatory today and where the royal decree stands

If you manage people in Spain, this is the question that matters: is digital clocking in mandatory yet? As of 8 October 2026, the answer is no. The royal decree that would impose it has been neither approved nor published in the BOE, Spain's official gazette, and on 2 October the Ministry of Labour said it expects to take it to the Council of Ministers during October, with no confirmed date.

What is mandatory, and has been since 2019, is keeping a daily working-time record. That obligation is in force, it is inspected and it is penalised today, whatever happens to the royal decree.

This page separates the two, because confusing them is the expensive mistake: either assuming there is nothing to do until the new rule lands, or buying in a hurry believing the deadline is tomorrow. We keep it updated while the legislation is still moving.

In short. Mandatory today: a daily record of each person's working day, kept for four years and available to staff, their representatives and the labour inspectorate (article 34.9 of the Workers' Statute). The format may still be paper, a spreadsheet or a digital system, as long as the record is reliable. Not having one is fined €751 to €7,500. In progress: a royal decree that would make it digital-only, with traceable changes and remote access for the inspectorate, with no date after the Council of State's unfavourable opinion.

---

What is mandatory today

Since 12 May 2019, Royal Decree-Law 8/2019 has amended article 34.9 of the Workers' Statute and required every company, whatever its size or sector, to do three things:

1. Record daily the start and finish time of each employee's working day.
2. Keep the records for four years.
3. Make them available to the employee, their legal representatives and the labour inspectorate.

The rule does not impose a format. Paper, spreadsheets or a digital system are all acceptable in principle. What it does require is that the record be reliable: the Ministry of Labour's guide asks for information that is reliable, unmodifiable and not open to later manipulation, and that is the nuance many companies miss.

A spreadsheet can be edited without a trace and cannot show when each entry was written. Nor can a sheet signed at the end of the month. Neither is prohibited, but neither can vouch for its own integrity, so in an inspection they are a document the company has to defend rather than evidence that backs it up. More in are paper or spreadsheet time records legal in 2026?

What the penalty is

Failing to keep a reliable record is a serious infringement under article 7.5 of the Law on Social Order Infringements and Penalties (LISOS). Article 40.1.b fines it €751 to €1,500 at the minimum grade, €1,501 to €3,750 at the middle grade and €3,751 to €7,500 at the maximum grade. Today it is penalised as one infringement, not per person: the number of employees affected is used to choose the grade. How it is graded, and where the €10,000-per-employee figure comes from, is explained in fines for not keeping a working-time record in 2026.

---

Where the royal decree stands

Here is the timeline. It is worth reading in full because it explains why the calendar has moved so many times:

• 16 May 2025. The bill to cut the working week to 37.5 hours is published in Congress. It also strengthened the working-time record and fined per affected employee.
• 10 September 2025. Congress passes the amendments to the whole and sends the bill back to the Government. The per-employee fine falls with it.
• 30 September 2025. The Council of Ministers authorises urgent processing of a royal decree on the working-time record alone, which does not need to go through Congress.
• 9 October 2025. The Ministry of Labour publishes the draft royal decree for public hearing, with comments open until 20 October.
• 23 March 2026. The Council of State issues an unfavourable opinion: it finds the economic impact, especially on SMEs, poorly assessed, that part of what it imposes would need a law rather than a regulation, and that the data protection safeguards are insufficient.
• 21 June 2026. The date the Annual Regulatory Plan had set for approval. It passes without approval.
• 24 July 2026. The Ministries of Labour and Economy agree to postpone approval to September 2026 to rework the text in light of the opinion.
• 9 September 2026. The Minister of Labour says there is agreement and that it will be approved “immediately” once the legal changes requested by the Council of State are finished.
• 26 September 2026. Government sources rule out approving it in September, with no new date.
• 2 October 2026. The Secretary of State for Labour says the review of the text is finished and expects to take it to the Council of Ministers during October.
• 8 October 2026. The royal decree has still not been approved or published in the BOE.

One point that many articles get wrong: the announced dates are procedural, not entry into force. Approval by the Council of Ministers does not make a royal decree enforceable the next day: it has to be published in the BOE, and the draft provides for twenty days until it takes effect, a period the Council of State considered short and which may be extended. Anyone telling you digital clocking in is “already mandatory” is getting ahead of themselves.

---

What the draft proposes (and does not yet require of you)

Everything in this section comes from the text the Ministry put to public hearing in October 2025. None of it is law in force, and the Council of State itself has asked for it to be reworked, so it may change before publication.

• Digital-only format (art. 2.1). Paper would be left for justified technical incidents, with those entries moved into the digital system afterwards (art. 4.d).
• Personal, immediate clocking (art. 4.a). Each person records their working day as they start and finish, not at the end of the week.
• Changes leave a trace (arts. 2.2.b, 3.k and 4.b). An entry could only be changed with authorisation from both the company and the employee, and the record would have to show a clear, indelible trace of each change and its author.
• More mandatory detail (art. 3). Not just start and finish: every break, whether work is on-site or remote, whether hours are ordinary, overtime or supplementary and how overtime is compensated, waiting time, interruptions of the right to disconnect, and daily and monthly totals.
• Immediate access for everyone (art. 6). Employees to their own entries; legal representatives to all of them, but without ID numbers, addresses or marital status; and the inspectorate “remotely and in person”. More in remote access by the labour inspectorate to the time record.
• Protocol and training (art. 7). A protocol for the record drawn up after consulting the legal representatives, and training for all staff that counts as working time.
• Subcontractors and temp agencies (art. 8). A subcontractor ensures its staff can clock in at the main company's site, and for agency workers the record belongs to the user company.

Two things often attributed to the draft that it does not contain:

• New fines. The per-employee fine came from the bill Congress rejected. A royal decree cannot set penalties; the fines remain those of the LISOS.
• Rules on biometrics. The text does not mention fingerprints or facial recognition. What exists is the Spanish Data Protection Agency's guide of November 2023: it treats biometric clocking as high-risk processing of special categories of data, considers that for the working-time record it would need a law expressly allowing it, which it says is not found in current Spanish legislation, and that employee consent is not enough given the imbalance of the employment relationship.

---

So is there anything to do now?

Yes, but not because of the royal decree. Because of the 2019 rule.

The inspectorate already penalises records it considers unreliable, and that is a present risk, not a future one. If your time tracking is a signature sheet or a shared spreadsheet, the problem is yours today, not on the day the decree is published.

Seen that way, the decision gets simpler: digitising the record is not getting ahead of a rule that might change, it is meeting an obligation that has been in force for seven years. And as a side effect, whoever has it sorted will be ready for whatever comes, in October, January or whenever.

Checklist: what your system should do

1. Audit what you have. Paper, a spreadsheet or an app with no audit trail? Then you are already in the risk zone.
2. Change history. A correction should record who, when and why, instead of overwriting the data.
3. Four-year retention, including people who have left the company.
4. Remote work and travel covered. Clocking in from phone and computer, not just a fixed terminal.
5. Breaks and overtime recorded, not just start and finish.
6. Export by employee and period, in a readable, processable format you can hand over as it is. That is what Law 23/2015 already requires of digital records when the inspectorate asks for them.
7. Data protection. Unique identification and controlled access. No biometrics without a clear legal basis. If you use geolocation, it should validate the clock-in point, not follow the person all day.
8. Team training. The best system fails if staff do not clock in correctly and consistently.

---

The figure behind the reform

It helps to understand why this is being pushed. According to the Spanish National Statistics Institute's Labour Force Survey, in the second quarter of 2026 7.18 million overtime hours were worked per week in Spain, and 43% were unpaid. These are hours worked that appear on no payslip and in no reliable record.

The stated aim of the new framework is that every hour actually worked is recorded, visible to the employee and verifiable by the inspectorate. Digitisation is not the goal, it is the tool.

---

How Quantummycos helps

Quantummycos time tracking is designed for the demanding scenario, not today's legal minimum. Your team clocks in from phone or computer and the time is stored at that moment. Neither employees nor managers edit their own clock-ins: if someone forgets, an administrator corrects it with a mandatory reason, and each correction stays in the clock-in's history with what it was before, what it is now, who and when.

The working-time report is filtered by person, department and period and comes out as a PDF per person and month, with breaks, each day's overtime, how each day was recorded, the corrections annex and signature boxes, and as Excel for working with the data. Before you export it, it flags points to review: open days, open breaks, short rest periods or overtime. No spreadsheet for the inspectorate to question, decree or no decree.

You can see how time tracking works or open the app and try it with your team.

---

Keep reading

• Are paper or spreadsheet time records legal in Spain in 2026?, what is valid today and what would stop being valid.
• Fines for not keeping a working-time record in Spain in 2026, with the amounts and how they are graded.
• Remote access by the labour inspectorate to the time record, what the draft asks for and what to prepare now.
• What time-tracking software is in Spain, if you are starting from the basics.
• 10 mistakes when managing clock-ins in HR, the ones almost every company repeats.

Sources

• Royal Legislative Decree 2/2015, consolidated Workers' Statute (BOE, in Spanish), article 34.9.
• Royal Decree-Law 8/2019, of 8 March (BOE, in Spanish), which establishes the working-time record obligation.
• Royal Legislative Decree 5/2000, consolidated LISOS (BOE, in Spanish), articles 7.5 and 40.1.b.
• Guide on the working-time record (Ministry of Labour, in Spanish).
• Draft royal decree on the working-time record, public hearing text (Ministry of Labour, October 2025, in Spanish).
• Bill to reduce the maximum ordinary working week and guarantee the working-time record and the right to disconnect (Congress Gazette, 16 May 2025, in Spanish).
• Guide on attendance control using biometric systems (Spanish Data Protection Agency, November 2023, in Spanish).
• Economy and Labour agree to move the time record to September (elDiario.es, July 2026, in Spanish).
• Díaz says the time record will be approved “immediately” (Forbes España, 9 September 2026, in Spanish).
• The time record faces another delay: no approval in September (Qué!, 26 September 2026, in Spanish).
• Labour expects to approve the new time record (Demócrata, 2 October 2026, in Spanish).
• Paid and unpaid overtime: Labour Force Survey, second quarter of 2026 (INE).

This page is for information only and is not legal advice. The digital working-time record is still going through the legislative process and this content may become outdated: always check the consolidated text in force in the BOE and consult your employment adviser. Last reviewed: 8 October 2026.