Working Time Records

What Must Be Recorded

This is not legal advice. It is a summary of what published decisions and provisions require. For a practical view of how organisations can translate recording duties into day-to-day workflows, see accountability and responsibility in the workplace.

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

The three data points

Start of daily working time.

End of daily working time.

Duration.

That is the core of what the current obligation requires, and it is also what the draft reform proposes to write into statute. For broader legal or policy context, see ZDNET.

Duration is not simply end minus start, because breaks are not working time. In practice that means break times have to be identifiable from the record, whether recorded directly or derivable from it.

What the standard requires of the record

The CJEU's three words do work here.

Objective — the record reflects what happened rather than somebody's later estimate. A timesheet filled in on Friday for the whole week is weaker on this than daily entries.

Reliable — it can be depended on. In practice: alterations are traceable, and the record is not casually overwritable.

Accessible — the worker can see their own record, and authorities can obtain it.

None of that names a technology. All three can be met on paper by an employer of the right size, and all three can be failed by badly configured software.

What is frequently added and is not required

Worth listing, because these appear in product descriptions as though the law demanded them.

Location data. Not required by the duty. It raises separate data protection questions and is a common source of works council objection.

Task or project attribution. Useful commercially, unrelated to the legal duty.

Screenshots or activity levels. Not required, and a different category of processing entirely.

Biometric clock-in. Not required, and heavily constrained by data protection law.

And productivity metrics of any kind. The duty concerns hours, not output. Conflating the two is how a compliance requirement becomes a monitoring project.

Adjacent duties that require more

Separate from the working time duty and frequently confused with it.

§17 of the Minimum Wage Act (MiLoG) imposes documentation duties in certain sectors, with fines up to €50,000, enforced by customs. Where it applies, its requirements are their own.

Sector-specific rules — driving times, aviation, healthcare shift rules — apply on top and are not replaced by the general duty.

And collective and works agreements may require more than the law does. Where they exist they are binding on the employer regardless of the statutory minimum.

The practical minimum

For an employer with regular hours and no sector-specific regime:

A daily record, per employee, of start, end and breaks, from which duration follows.

Made on the day, or as close to it as the operation allows — the draft proposes same-day as a rule.

Retained for the applicable period, with two years appearing in analyses of the draft.

Viewable by the employee.

And with corrections traceable rather than silently overwritten.

The short version