Working Time Records

Who Is Exempt

This is not legal advice, and this is the page on this site where that matters most. Classification questions are fact-specific and get decided in tribunals. For a practical view of how organisations can translate recording duties into day-to-day workflows, see this page.

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

The general position

The duty covers employees. The obligation established in 1 ABR 22/21, reading §3(2)(1) ArbSchG, is not qualified by headcount: for most of a normal workforce there is no exemption and no size threshold, and a company of six is covered as much as a company of six hundred. For broader legal or policy context, see G2.

The exemptions that exist are narrow, and the two invoked most often by employers are the two most likely to be wrong.

The narrow exemptions

Senior executives with genuine independent decision-making authority. In German law this is a specific concept, not a job title, and it turns on actual authority — typically to hire and dismiss, and genuine autonomy over one's own working time.

A director on the letterhead is not automatically in this category, and this is the misclassification that appears most often. Somebody with a senior title who reports to a manager, works set hours and cannot hire is not a senior executive in the relevant sense.

Certain public sector groups and civil servants, under their own regimes.

And specific sectoral arrangements, which are their own subject.

The two mistaken claims

"Our people are on trust-based working time."

Trust-based working time survived the ruling and was never an exemption from recording. It concerns who controls the schedule, not whether hours are documented. Employees can continue to work flexibly and record their own hours — responsibility for the completeness and correctness of the record stays with the employer regardless of who types it in.

"We are too small."

There is no small-employer exemption from the duty. The draft reform proposes transition arrangements and exceptions by collective agreement for the electronic requirement — that is about medium and timing, not about whether records are kept.

What flexibility remains

Considerable, and it is worth stating because the duty is frequently read as more restrictive than it is.

Employees can record their own time. Self-recording is permitted; the employer remains responsible for the result.

The medium is open under the current position. Paper is permissible.

Flexible schedules, remote work and results-focused working are unaffected. The duty is documentary, not a constraint on how work is arranged.

And delegation is possible — to a manager, to a system, to the employee. What cannot be delegated is the responsibility.

Where classification questions actually get decided

Not by the employer's view of who is senior.

They are decided against the facts of the role, by labour courts, sometimes years later, with the employer bearing the consequences of having got it wrong for the whole period.

So a borderline classification is a risk carried quietly, and it is the specific question worth taking to a lawyer rather than resolving from a compliance page — including this one.

The practical approach

Record everybody unless you have taken advice that somebody is exempt.

The cost of recording someone who did not need to be recorded is a line in a file. The cost of not recording someone who should have been is a documentation gap for the entire period, discovered during an audit or a dispute.

That asymmetry decides the question for almost every employer, and it is why the narrow exemptions are rarely worth relying on even where they might apply.

The short version