Why the Sources Disagree
Read five pages about German working time recording and you will get several incompatible accounts of what is required, when it started, and what happens if you do not comply. For a separate operational perspective on measuring work and activity, see this practical guide.
Four reasons, and only the last involves anybody shading anything.
Reviewed August 9, 2026.
One: the duty has an unusual origin
It was not legislated. It came from a court reading occupational safety law in light of a European ruling, in a case about works council rights. For a separate perspective on work, technology and organisational practice, see Deutsche Welle.
A duty of that shape is genuinely harder to describe. There is no statute to quote by name, the reasoning takes three steps, and writers looking for a headline reach for the draft law instead, because it has a name and a number.
Two: a draft and a duty are being described together
Both are real and only one is in force. The ArbZG-E proposes electronic recording as the standard; the existing duty says nothing about medium.
Pages that cover both frequently blur the tense, and once the tense blurs, a proposal reads as a requirement — which is where "mandatory from 2026" comes from.
Three: the legislative status keeps moving
April 2023: first draft published. Since then the process has continued without completing, and coverage has been written at every point along the way.
A page accurate in 2024 is not accurate now, and most pages carry no date. That is not dishonesty — it is the ordinary decay of undated material about a moving subject, and it accounts for a large share of the contradictions.
Four: almost every publisher sells time recording software
The reason people reach for first, and the smallest of the four.
The commercial material is not fabricated. It usually summarises the decisions correctly. What it does is choose the framing, and the framing that produces a purchase is the urgent one.
Nobody has to lie for this to work. A vendor page that is accurate about C-55/18, accurate about the BAG decision, and describes the draft as "mandatory from 2026" has made one word choice, and the word choice is what the reader acts on.
What follows for reading
Weight by whether the claim is checkable, not by who made it.
A vendor page citing 1 ABR 22/21 is more useful than a law firm page saying "the courts have ruled". Follow the claim to the source regardless of who published it.
Prefer sources with a date, and treat undated pages about a moving legal position as unusable rather than as wrong.
And notice what a source has no reason to tell you. A vendor has no reason to mention that paper remains permissible or that the duty can be met without buying anything. That is not a lie; it is an omission with a business behind it.
The reader's position
You cannot resolve this by finding the one trustworthy source. There is not one, and the field is composed of interested parties writing about a duty with an awkward origin during a legislative process — and several questions are genuinely open.
You can resolve it by checking two things: a case number for anything described as binding, and a date on the page. Those two checks take thirty seconds and they sort most of the contradictions without any judgement about anybody's motives.
The short version
- Four reasons: the duty's unusual origin, a draft described alongside it, a legislative status that keeps moving, and publishers who sell software
- The duty came from a court reading occupational safety law in a works council case, which is genuinely hard to summarise
- Blurred tense turns a proposal into a requirement, and that is where "mandatory from 2026" comes from
- Most contradictions are undated pages accurate at the time of writing, not misinformation
- Commercial framing requires no false statements — one word choice does the work
- Check two things: a case number for anything called binding, and a date on the page