Is time tracking mandatory for remote work? Everything you need to know

It's one of the questions HR departments get most often now that hybrid work has become the norm: do employees who work remotely also have to clock in? The answer is yes, with no nuance to it. Spain's time tracking rules don't distinguish between on-site, hybrid or remote work: if there's an employment relationship, there's an obligation to record working time.

What does change is how that obligation is met when someone works from home. Law 10/2021 of 9 July, on remote work, devoted a specific article to it and added requirements that don't exist for on-site work: the written agreement, the agreed monitoring methods, flexible hours and the right to digital disconnection.

The short answer: remote workers clock in as well

The obligation to record working time comes from article 34.9 of the Workers' Statute, introduced by Royal Decree-Law 8/2019. The wording leaves no room for doubt: the company must guarantee a daily record of working time, including the specific start and end times of each employee's working day.

That article sets out no exception based on where the work is performed. It doesn't say «on-site employees», it doesn't exclude people working from home, and it doesn't leave out roles with flexible hours. The obligation covers the entire workforce, wherever they physically are.

The company shall guarantee a daily record of working time, which must include the specific start and end times of each employee's working day.

On top of that, Law 10/2021 establishes the principle of equal rights: people working remotely have exactly the same rights as those working on site. If time tracking is a right for on-site employees — because it's the evidence of the hours actually worked and of any overtime — it is equally a right for remote ones.

What Law 10/2021 actually says about time tracking

The remote work law doesn't just restate the general obligation: it dedicates article 14, «The right to an adequate time record», to it. And it introduces a requirement that goes beyond article 34.9 of the Workers' Statute.

The time recording system must faithfully reflect the time that the person working remotely devotes to their work, without prejudice to flexible working hours, and must include, among other things, the start and end of the working day.

The two key phrases are «faithfully reflect» and «among other things». The first rules out estimates: you can't simply assume that a remote employee works 9 to 6 because that's what the contract says. The second makes clear that start and end times are the minimum, not the maximum: if the working day includes meaningful breaks or interruptions, the record has to be able to capture them.

When the remote work law applies

This is where many companies get confused. Law 10/2021 only applies to regular remote work, and its article 1 sets a specific threshold.

The 30% threshold

• Remote work is considered regular when it accounts for at least 30% of working time over a reference period of three months (or the equivalent proportion for shorter contracts).
• For a full-time Monday-to-Friday schedule, that 30% works out at roughly a day and a half per week.
• Remote work: performed at the employee's home or at a place of their choosing, for all or part of the working day, on a regular basis.
• Telework: remote work carried out through the exclusive or predominant use of computer, telematic and telecommunications systems.
• Below that threshold there's no need to sign a remote work agreement, but the obligation to record working time stays exactly the same.

What a remote time record must contain

A valid remote record has to meet the same standards of objectivity and reliability as an on-site one. These are the elements the Labour Inspectorate checks when it reviews a company with remote staff.

Requirements for remote time records

• Start and end times of the working day, day by day and for each employee.
• Significant breaks and interruptions, particularly where the collective agreement or company agreement regulates them.
• Real-time recording: entries must be made as they happen, not filled in from memory at the end of the week or month.
• An objective, reliable system that cannot be unilaterally altered by either the company or the employee, with an audit trail for any later change.
• Accessible to the employee, who must be able to consult their own records at any time.
• Kept for 4 years, available to the workforce, their legal representatives and the Labour and Social Security Inspectorate.
• Prior consultation with the employees' legal representatives when defining the system, where such representation exists.

The remote work agreement must state the monitoring method

Where remote work is regular, Law 10/2021 requires a written remote work agreement to be signed before remote working begins. Its minimum content is set out exhaustively in article 7, and two of its items bear directly on time tracking.

Minimum content of the agreement (article 7)

• An inventory of the equipment, tools and resources provided, with their useful life or maximum renewal period.
• A list of the expenses the employee may incur and how they will be compensated.
• Working hours and, within them, the availability rules.
• The percentage and distribution between on-site and remote work.
• The company workplace to which the employee is assigned.
• The remote work location chosen by the employee.
• Notice periods for exercising the right to revert to on-site work.
• The means of employer monitoring of the work — this is where the time tracking system to be used must be stated.
• The procedure to follow if technical difficulties arise.
• Instructions on data protection and information security.
• The duration of the agreement.

The practical consequence matters: having a time tracking tool is not enough on its own. If the remote work agreement says nothing about it, or hasn't been signed at all, the company is non-compliant even though the records exist. And failing to formalise the agreement as legally required is a serious infringement in its own right.

Flexible hours and the right to digital disconnection

The most common objection goes like this: «if we work remotely for the flexibility, clocking in ruins the whole point». It doesn't. Article 14 itself says the record must be kept «without prejudice to flexible working hours», and article 13 expressly recognises the remote worker's right to flexible scheduling within the agreed margins.

Clocking in doesn't mean a rigid schedule: it means leaving a record of when work actually happens. Someone can start at 7:30 one day and 10:00 the next, or split the day into two blocks; the record simply has to reflect it.

There's a second effect that often goes underappreciated: the record is the ally of the right to digital disconnection recognised in article 18 of Law 10/2021. The recorded working day defines where working time ends. Without a record, the line between work and personal life disappears — and remote work is precisely where invisible overtime accumulates.

How far employer monitoring can go

Article 22 of Law 10/2021 allows the company to adopt whatever surveillance and monitoring measures it deems appropriate to verify compliance with employment obligations, including digital means. But it must do so with «due regard for the dignity» of the employee.

This is where companies most often overreach when they try to «control» remote work. Recording working time and monitoring activity are two different things, and the second is subject to strict proportionality limits.

Lines you shouldn

• Periodic screenshots, keyloggers or an always-on webcam: disproportionate for the simple purpose of recording working time, and repeatedly questioned by the courts and by the Spanish Data Protection Agency.
• Geolocation: in remote work the place of work is already stated in the agreement, so tracking location rarely passes the necessity test. If used at all, it must be one-off, disclosed and limited to the moment of clocking in.
• Biometric data: the Spanish Data Protection Agency takes a very restrictive view of fingerprint or facial recognition for clocking in; employee consent alone is not a sufficient legal basis.
• Prior, explicit information: the employee must know which monitoring methods are used, for what purpose and how long the data is kept.
• Data minimisation: collect only what's needed to evidence working time, not a detailed log of the day's activity.

Common mistakes in remote time tracking

What the Inspectorate finds

• Spreadsheets filled in at the end of the month: they don't evidence real time, can be altered without a trace and carry no evidential weight.
• Treating the contractual schedule as the record because «the hours are already in the contract». The record must reflect the actual working day, not the planned one.
• Only recording the people who come into the office and leaving remote staff outside the system.
• Confusing connection with working time: an «active» status in a messaging tool is not a valid time record.
• Not signing the remote work agreement, or signing one that doesn't state the monitoring methods.
• Not keeping records for four years, or being unable to export them when the Inspectorate asks.
• Not recording overtime worked outside normal hours — in remote setups, typically early mornings and after dinner.

Penalties for not recording remote working time

Breaching the rules on recording working time is a serious infringement under Spain's Law on Infringements and Penalties in the Social Order (LISOS). The amounts in force, updated by Law 10/2021 itself, are as follows.

Serious infringement bands

• Minimum band: €751 to €1,500.
• Medium band: €1,501 to €3,750.
• Maximum band: €3,751 to €7,500.
• The Inspectorate generally applies the penalty per affected employee, so for a 20-person workforce with no records the total can escalate quickly.
• Failing to formalise the remote work agreement as legally required is an additional, separate serious infringement.

On top of the fine there's the litigation risk: in an overtime claim, the absence of a record works against the employer, because courts tend to accept the employee's estimate when there's no objective evidence to contradict it. If you want to size up your company's exposure, try our penalties calculator.

What will change with the new digital time record

The regulation being prepared by the Ministry of Labour, whose approval has been pushed back to September 2026, will reinforce exactly the points where remote work is weakest: it will require the record to be digital, interoperable and remotely accessible to the employee, their legal representatives and the Inspectorate, and will rule out paper systems and spreadsheets.

For companies with remote staff this isn't a disruptive change but a confirmation of the direction of travel: if your team already clocks in from an app with immediate recording and a full audit trail, adapting will take next to nothing. We cover it in detail in our article on the digital time tracking delay to September 2026.

How to handle remote time tracking with Horalia

Horalia is built so that clocking in works the same from the office, from home or from anywhere else, without the company having to run two systems in parallel.

Everything the law requires, handled in the app

• Clock in from a mobile, from a browser or from a fixed terminal — a tablet placed at the entrance or at another strategic point on site — with immediate recording of start time, breaks and end time.
• The same system for remote and on-site days: in hybrid teams nobody has to switch tools depending on where they're working that day.
• Tamper-proof history and a full audit trail of any correction, showing who made it and when.
• Works with flexible and split schedules: people clock in when they actually work, not when they're «supposed to».
• Automatic alerts for unclosed days, excess hours and rest periods that weren't respected.
• Accumulated hours balance visible in real time to both the employee and their manager.
• Reports and exports ready to hand over to the Inspectorate, with records kept for the required four years.
• No mandatory biometrics, and data hosted in the European Union in line with the GDPR.

And because remote work doesn't end at clocking in, the same platform gives you absence and holiday management, schedules and calendars, shifts and document management with electronic signature — ideal for getting remote work agreements signed without printing a thing. You can discover Horalia or try it for free.