Compliance guide
What the law requires today, what is about to change, and exactly what your company has to do to comply without drama.
In short
Since 12 May 2019, article 34.9 of the Spanish Workers’ Statute has required every company in Spain, regardless of size or sector, to record the start and end time of each employee’s working day, to keep those records for four years and to make them available to the labour inspectorate. Failing to do so is a serious infringement under article 7.5 of the LISOS.
The obligation comes from Royal Decree-Law 8/2019, which amended article 34.9 of the Workers’ Statute. It applies to every company, with no headcount threshold and no sector exemption, and it requires three things: a daily record of the start and end of each person’s working day, four-year retention of those records, and availability to the employee, their legal representatives and the labour inspectorate.
The rule in force imposes no format: paper, spreadsheet or digital system are all accepted. But it does require reliability, and that is the nuance many companies miss. A spreadsheet can be edited without a trace and cannot prove when each entry was created; a sheet signed at month end cannot either. In practice, a record that cannot evidence its own integrity is a document the company will have to defend.
Since September 2025, Spain’s Ministry of Labour has been processing a royal decree that would make the record digital-only, immutable, traceable and interoperable with the inspectorate in real time. The text received an unfavourable opinion from the Council of State in March 2026 and its approval has been postponed; as things stand it has not been published in the BOE. Worth following, but not worth waiting for: the 2019 obligation is already in force and already enforced.
Failing to keep a reliable record is classified as a serious infringement under article 7.5 of the LISOS. The amounts depend on the degree the inspectorate applies and on the current schedule in article 40, which has been updated over time, so it is worth checking the consolidated text in the BOE. The draft of the new framework also proposes calculating penalties per affected employee, which would multiply the exposure for medium and large workforces.
Audit your current system, replace paper and spreadsheets with a digital record that has an immutable change history, cover remote and field work with clock-ins from mobile and desktop, verify that you can export the last four years of records in one click, look after data protection with unique identification and controlled access, and train the team: the best system fails if people do not clock in correctly and consistently.
This page is informational and does not constitute legal advice. For specific cases, consult your employment adviser and always check the current consolidated text in the BOE.
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