Working Time Records

Trust-Based Working Time

This is not legal advice.

The most common employer response to the recording duty is that it does not apply because their people work on trust. That is a misunderstanding of what trust-based working time is, and it was a misunderstanding before the ruling too. For a practical view of how organisations can translate recording duties into day-to-day workflows, see cognitive offloading.

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

What trust-based working time actually means

The employee controls when and where they work, and is measured on results rather than presence. For broader legal or policy context, see WIRED.

That is an arrangement about control of the schedule. It has never been an arrangement about whether hours are documented, and the two were only ever conflated because in practice many such arrangements involved no documentation at all.

The ruling did not abolish it. Employees can continue to work flexibly, choose their hours and be measured on outcomes. What they cannot do is have those hours go unrecorded.

What changed and what did not

Changed: the hours have to be recorded, under 1 ABR 22/21 reading §3(2)(1) ArbSchG. Start, end, duration.

Not changed: who decides when the work happens. Flexibility, remote work, results orientation and autonomy over the schedule are all unaffected — the duty is documentary, not a constraint on how work is arranged.

Not changed either: who may do the recording. Self-recording by the employee is permitted, which is the natural fit for a trust-based arrangement.

The part employers miss

Responsibility for completeness and correctness stays with the employer, regardless of who enters the data.

An employer who delegates recording to employees and does nothing further has delegated the task and retained the liability. If records are incomplete, the employer is answerable for the gap, not the employee who did not fill it in.

So delegation requires a control: somebody checks that records exist, that they are plausible, and that gaps get chased. That check is the work, and it is the part that gets omitted when "the team records their own time" is treated as a complete answer.

What this does to the arrangement in practice

Honestly, because it is not nothing.

It adds a daily action to a way of working that was partly attractive for not having one.

It makes overtime visible, which is the point from the employee's side and occasionally uncomfortable from the employer's — a trust-based arrangement that was quietly producing fifty-hour weeks now produces a record of fifty-hour weeks.

And it surfaces the rest-period question. Minimum daily rest is a right that records exist to make enforceable, and an arrangement where somebody answers messages at 23:00 and starts at 07:00 becomes documented rather than assumed.

That last effect is the ruling working as intended, and it is the reason some employers experience the duty as an imposition rather than as paperwork.

What to actually do

Keep the arrangement. It is lawful and it did not need to change.

Add self-recording, in whatever form fits — paper is permissible and a shared form is often enough.

Name who checks, and how often. Weekly is usually sufficient.

And decide in advance what happens when the record shows a problem — repeated long days, missing rest periods. Discovering that mid-audit is worse than having a position.

The short version