Working Time Records

Home Office and Flexibility

This is not legal advice.

Remote and flexible work is where employers most often assume the duty does not reach, and where the substantive protections behind it are most likely to be breached without anybody noticing. For an additional implementation-oriented example, see employee attendance tracking software.

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

The duty applies

Location does not affect it. An employee working from home is an employee, and the record requirement is the same: start, end, duration. For additional workplace and technology context, see Council of the European Union.

Nor does flexibility. Trust-based working time was never an exemption, and choosing your own hours is not the same as those hours going undocumented.

Self-recording is the natural arrangement, permitted and well-suited — nobody else knows when the person started.

Why this is where the protections matter most

The boundary disappears. An office worker leaves the building; a remote worker closes a laptop and opens it again at 21:00.

The rest period is the specific issue. Minimum daily rest between the end of one working day and the start of the next is a right, and answering messages at 23:00 before a 07:00 start breaches it — quietly, repeatedly, and with nobody keeping a record that would show it.

That is precisely the situation the ruling addressed. The employee cannot prove it, the employer does not know, and the protection exists on paper only.

What the record surfaces

Honestly, because it is uncomfortable.

Fragmented days. Three hours, a gap, four hours, an evening block. Legitimate and it needs recording as what it is, not as a nine-to-five that did not happen.

Rest period breaches. Once documented, they are visible, and an employer who sees them has to do something.

And availability creep, where the working day is nominally eight hours and spans fourteen.

A record that shows these has done its job. Treating the finding as a recording problem rather than as a working arrangement problem is the response that leads somewhere expensive.

What works practically

Record blocks, not a single span. A day worked in two or three pieces is recorded as two or three pieces. A start at 09:00 and an end at 21:00 with a nine-hour "break" is not a useful record and is not accurate.

Record on the day. Remote workers reconstructing a week on Friday produce the weakest possible version of the record.

Make the tool available where the work happens. A system that requires a company laptop and a VPN gets used less than a shared form.

And agree what counts. A message answered in the evening — is that working time? The answer matters and it should be decided in advance rather than argued about later.

What not to do

Do not use presence detection as a proxy. Login times, VPN connections and activity monitoring are a different category and they measure the machine rather than the work.

Do not require recording at a fixed daily moment. It defeats the flexibility the arrangement exists for and produces reconstruction.

And do not treat gaps as evidence of not working. A record showing four hours on a Tuesday may be accurate, and if the arrangement is results-based that is between the parties — the record documents hours, it does not assess performance.

The short version