THE WAYPOINT SUR
It can get lonely keeping time.
The deadline you are being sold
If a supplier is telling you that a digital time-clock law lands this month, with fines of €10,000 per worker, both halves of that are wrong. The second is wrong in a way worth knowing about.
Here is where it actually stands. The Ministerio de Trabajo y Economía Social has opened a consulta pública previa — preliminary public consultation on a draft ministerial order setting the technical and security requirements for the registro de jornada — working-day record. That order would develop a draft royal decree which is itself not yet law. Neither has been approved by the Consejo de Ministros or published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado, Spain's official gazette.
A consultation is not an obligation. What is an obligation, and has been since 12 May 2019, is the record itself.
So the question worth an hour of your evening is not what might be coming. It is whether the person who runs your payroll can produce the records you already owe.
If you are a solo autónomo with nobody on the payroll, none of this reaches you. The Estatuto de los Trabajadores — Workers' Statute governs employment relationships, and you are not required to clock yourself in and out of your own day. Worth saying plainly, because the supplier emails do not make the distinction.
"We have payroll" is not an answer
Ask whoever handles your employment paperwork for the monthly hours summary for your part-time employee. Not the payslip. The summary.
If it arrives, check it against the daily entries and confirm the worker actually received their copy. If it comes back as a question, you have found the thing this issue is about.
Article 12.4(c) of the Estatuto wants a part-timer's hours recorded day by day, totalled monthly, and a copy of that monthly total handed to them along with their wage slip. The records are kept four years.
Miss it, and the contract can be presumed full-time. That presumption is rebuttable, so it is not an automatic conversion. But you would be the one rebutting it, and the evidence you would ordinarily reach for is the record nobody made.
What everyone owes
Article 34.9 covers every employee, part-time or not: a daily record of the working day, showing the specific start and finish time for each person, kept four years, available to the worker, to their legal representatives, and to the Inspección de Trabajo, the labour inspectorate.
There is no small-company exemption and there never has been. Two staff and fifty staff carry the same duty.
There is also nothing in that article requiring the record to be digital. That gap is what the supplier emails are filling.
Where the €10,000 came from
A bill that failed. The 37.5-hour working week proposal carried a fine of up to €10,000 per worker, and Congress rejected it on 10 September 2025 by 178 votes to 170.
What applies now is smaller and a different shape. Not keeping the record is a grave — serious infringement, and the band runs €751 to €7,500 per infringement rather than per worker. Do not read €7,500 as a ceiling on everything you could owe, though. How many people were affected can move the figure inside the band.
If someone quotes you €10,000 an employee, they are quoting a bill that died a year ago this week.
Tonight, if you employ anyone
Daily entries. Can you produce a start time and a finish time, for each day worked, for each person?
The monthly summary. For part-timers, does it exist, and did they get a copy with their pay?
Retention. Four years back, or to the start of the contract if that is more recent.
Extra hours. Part-timers cannot work ordinary overtime, except in the emergencies article 35.3 covers. Anything beyond their contracted hours has to fit one of the horas complementarias — additional agreed hours routes, so have those checked against the rules that apply to the contract in front of you.
Breaks. Whether the daily break counts as working time depends on your convenio — collective agreement or on the contract, so start and finish times alone do not settle it.
This is our reading of the statute rather than legal advice. If a gap turns up, take that specific gap to someone qualified. The Colegio Oficial de Gestores Administrativos de Málaga, C/ Babel 5, 29006 Málaga, 952 354 208, will point you at a member who does this work.
Spanish-lite
Resumen mensual de horas — monthly hours summary. The document to ask for by name.
¿Me pasas el resumen mensual de horas? — Can you send me the monthly hours summary? The one question this issue is really about.
The bottom line
Nothing on digital time recording had been approved or published when we checked on Tuesday evening, whatever your supplier's email says, and no date has been set. The record itself has been required since May 2019, and that is the one to check. Tolerated is not the same as legal. The cheapest hour you will spend this week is the one where you ask for the monthly summary and find out whether it exists.
Onwards — A. and the WaypointSur team, with the hours written down as we go.
