Spain's digital time-tracking decree still has not reached Cabinet

Spain’s Secretary of State for Labour, Joaquín Pérez Rey, said on 2 September that the royal decree on digital time-tracking will reach the Council of Ministers “a la mayor brevedad”, declining to give a date. The Labour and Economy ministries had agreed in July to approve it in September, and unions have been pressing for approval this month. The draft would make clocking-in exclusively digital, immutable and remotely accessible to the Labour Inspectorate, and would require teleworked days to be logged as effective working time. The draft sanctions regime raises the maximum fine to €10,000 per affected employee.

Why this matters

Several sites are reporting this as though digital clocking-in becomes law in Spain in September. It does not, and it has not: the decree has not been approved by the Council of Ministers and does not appear in the BOE. If you work remotely for a Spanish employer, nothing has changed in your obligations this month. What is worth knowing is what the draft would do when it does pass, because the teleworking provision is the part that affects you directly: home-working time would have to be recorded as effective working time, on a system your employer cannot retrospectively alter and the Inspectorate can read remotely.

Context

Spain has required working-time records since 2019, and the current dispute is about modernising rather than introducing them. The decree has had a long path: the Council of State rejected an earlier version, and the timetable has slipped more than once. The remote-working provisions matter because time recording has historically been the weakest for people not in an office, which is precisely where unrecorded overtime concentrates.

What to watch

Whether it reaches the Council of Ministers this month as Labour has indicated, and whether the teleworking provisions survive in their current form. Until it is published in the BOE, it is a draft.