If you employ anyone in Spain, you have been legally required to keep a daily record of their start and finish times since 12 May 2019. Not a monthly total, not a signed sheet at the end of the quarter. Each day, each person, the specific hour they started and the specific hour they stopped. The obligation applies to a company with two staff exactly as it applies to one with fifty, and there has never been a small-employer exemption.
Most small employers on the Costa first hear about this when a software supplier emails them about a new digital time-clock law, usually attached to a fine of €10,000 per worker. That email is wrong twice over. No digital-recording decree has been approved or published. The €10,000 figure comes from a bill Congress rejected. The rule that does apply is seven years old, is rarely mentioned by anyone selling anything, and carries a consequence for part-time contracts that costs considerably more than the fine.
Last verified: 8 September 2026.
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The rule, and the date it started
The registro de jornada — working-day record sits in article 34.9 of the Estatuto de los Trabajadores — Workers’ Statute. It was inserted by article 10 of Royal Decree-Law 8/2019, published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado — official state gazette number 61 on 12 March 2019. That decree’s sixth final provision gave the recording duty a two-month runway, so it became applicable on 12 May 2019. The decree itself entered into force on 13 March 2019, which is a different date and worth keeping separate if anyone quotes it at you.
The text obliges the company to guarantee the daily record of the working day, including the horario concreto de inicio y finalización — specific start and finish time of each worker. How you organise it is settled by collective agreement, by a company agreement, or failing either of those, by the employer’s decision after consulting the workers’ legal representatives.
What a compliant record actually contains
Four things.
- A daily entry for every employee, with the hour they started and the hour they finished.
- Retention for four years.
- Availability to the workers themselves, to their legal representatives, and to the Inspección de Trabajo — labour inspectorate.
- Separate totals and summaries for overtime, which article 35.5 requires in its own right and which a start-and-finish log does not automatically produce.
Nothing in article 34.9 requires the record to be digital. Paper is lawful, and so is a spreadsheet. The sales emails work the gap between what the law requires and what they imply it requires.
One further wrinkle: start and finish times do not by themselves establish effective working time. Whether the ordinary daily break counts as work depends on the applicable convenio colectivo — collective agreement or on the individual contract, under article 34.4. If your staff take an hour in the middle of the day, the answer to whether that hour is worked is in your convenio, not in your logbook.
Part-time contracts: the rule with real teeth
Article 12.4(c) goes further for part-time staff. Their hours must be recorded day by day and totalled monthly, and a copy of that monthly total has to be handed to the worker along with their wage slip. The records are kept at least four years.
Miss it and the contract is presumed to be full-time. That presumption is rebuttable, so it is not an automatic conversion. But you would be the one rebutting it, after the fact, and the evidence you would normally reach for is the record that was never made. At the end of that is a claim for pay and social security contributions calculated on a full-time basis.
Two related limits belong in the same conversation. Part-time employees cannot work ordinary overtime at all, except in the emergency circumstances article 35.3 covers. Anything beyond their contracted hours has to travel as horas complementarias — complementary hours, and article 12.5 provides two distinct routes: a specific written agreement, and, separately, voluntarily accepted complementary hours available on indefinite part-time contracts with a working week of not less than ten hours calculated on an annual basis. Which route applies is a question about the contract in front of you, so have it checked rather than assumed.
The fine, and the €10,000 figure that is not law
Failing to keep the record is a serious infringement under article 7.5 of the consolidated Law on Infringements and Penalties in the Social Order, Royal Legislative Decree 5/2000. Article 40.1(b) sets the penalty at €751 to €1,500 at the minimum grade, €1,501 to €3,750 at the medium grade, and €3,751 to €7,500 at the maximum.
Article 7.5 contains no per-worker clause. Articles 7.2 and 7.14 do, in as many words, and 7.5 does not. Nor is 7.5 among the eight articles listed in article 40.1(c bis), whose band runs to €10,000.
Do not read €7,500 as a ceiling on everything you could owe, though. The band is per infringement rather than per company, and article 39.2 expressly allows the number of workers affected to influence where inside the band a penalty lands.
The €10,000-per-worker figure that circulates in supplier emails and forum threads has a specific origin. It was in the bill on the 37.5-hour working week, parliamentary initiative 121/000058, which Congress rejected on 10 September 2025 by 178 votes to 170. That bill’s proposed per-worker rule applied only where a record was absent altogether or where its data had been falsified, not to every recording defect. The 40-hour maximum in article 34.1 of the Workers’ Statute stands unchanged.
The digital-only rule that has not arrived
Something is genuinely in motion, and it is smaller and earlier than the emails suggest. The Ministerio de Trabajo y Economía Social has opened a consulta pública previa — preliminary public consultation on a draft ministerial order setting the technical and security requirements for the working-day record. That order would develop the fifth final provision of a draft royal decree which is itself not yet law.
As at 8 September 2026, neither instrument has been approved by the Council of Ministers or published in the official gazette. There is no entry-into-force date, because there is not yet anything to bring into force. A consultation on a draft order is not an obligation you can breach.
Two practical consequences follow. Buying software does not create compliance, and declining to buy it does not remove the duty you already have. When the decree does land, the thing it changes is the format of the record, not whether the record is owed.
Household staff are a different regime
If the person you employ works in your home, you are not under the general regime at all. The special employment relationship of household employees is governed by Royal Decree 1620/2011, and its article 9.3bis disapplies the recording obligations in article 12.5(h) of the Workers’ Statute for part-time household workers.
That is a narrower carve-out than it is usually reported to be, and it is not a general exemption from keeping any record. Treat household employment as its own regime and check it on its own terms rather than mapping the rules above across.
If you have no employees
None of this reaches a solo autónomo — self-employed worker with nobody on the payroll. The Workers’ Statute governs employment relationships, and you are not required to record your own working day. The supplier emails do not make that distinction, which is why a good number of people who owe nothing have been quoted a price.
What to check this week
Ask whoever runs your payroll for the monthly hours summary for each part-time employee. Not the payslip, the summary. When it arrives, check it against the daily entries and confirm the worker actually received their copy. If it comes back as a question rather than a document, you have found your gap.
If a gap turns up, take that specific gap to somebody qualified rather than to a software demonstration. The Colegio Oficial de Gestores Administrativos de Málaga, at C/ Babel 5, Edificio Las Golondrinas 2, 1ª Planta, 29006 Málaga, telephone 952 354 208, will point you at a member who handles employment matters.
The five-minute version
- A daily record of each employee’s start and finish times has been required since 12 May 2019, with no exemption for small employers.
- Keep the records four years and make them available to the worker, their representatives, and the labour inspectorate.
- Part-time hours must also be totalled monthly, with a copy given to the worker alongside the payslip. Miss it and the contract is presumed full-time, rebuttably.
- The penalty band is €751 to €7,500 per infringement. The €10,000-per-worker figure comes from a bill Congress rejected in September 2025.
- No digital-recording decree has been approved or published as at 8 September 2026. A ministerial order on technical requirements is at public-consultation stage.
- Household staff sit under Royal Decree 1620/2011 and need checking separately.
Related guides
- RD 723/2026 in Spain: The Written Terms Every Employer Owes Staff from 5 October
- Hiring and Keeping Household Staff on the Costa del Sol
- Working in Spain: Permits, Contracts, Tax and Expat Employment
- Autónomo vs SL in Spain: Which Business Structure Is Better?
- VeriFactu Spain: What Self-Employed Expats Need to Know for 2027
- Becoming Autónomo in Spain: The Freelancer and Self-Employment Guide
General information, not legal advice, current as of 8 September 2026. Primary sources: the consolidated Estatuto de los Trabajadores (Royal Legislative Decree 2/2015) articles 12, 34 and 35; Royal Decree-Law 8/2019 article 10 and sixth final provision; the consolidated Law on Infringements and Penalties in the Social Order (Royal Legislative Decree 5/2000) articles 7, 39 and 40; Royal Decree 1620/2011 article 9.3bis; Congress of Deputies initiative 121/000058; and the Ministerio de Trabajo y Economía Social public consultation on the draft order establishing technical and security requirements for the working-day record.
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