New duty to inform employees in writing about their working conditions

Spain’s Council of Ministers approved a Royal Decree on 8 September 2026 that requires companies to inform workers in writing, and in detail, about the essential conditions of each employment relationship. For any HR manager the practical translation is direct: the contract now has to say much more than it used to, and the old habit of pointing everything to the collective agreement is over.

Quick answer

Question	What it means for the employer
What changes?	You must inform in writing about more essential contract elements (detailed salary, working time, probation, training, algorithms).
From when?	20 days after publication in the BOE. New contracts must comply from that point.
What about contracts already signed?	They stay valid. If the worker asks for the missing information, the company has up to 30 days to provide it.
”As per agreement” for salary and hours?	No longer enough. It has to be specified.
Standout new element?	A duty to inform about algorithms affecting the job.

Where the rule comes from

The Royal Decree transposes into Spanish law Directive (EU) 2019/1152 on transparent and predictable working conditions, which had been pending transposition since 2022. Spain was four years behind and faced the risk of a penalty from Brussels, so the approval closes that front.

The rule repeals Royal Decree 1659/1998, which until now governed the information employers had to hand over about the elements of the contract, and replaces it with a far broader minimum content.

What the contract must now include

The Royal Decree sets out a list of essential elements the employer must communicate in writing. The ones that matter most in a small company’s day to day:

• Start date and, where applicable, end date of the relationship.
• Registered address of the company and the workplace where the service is provided.
• Content of the work and, for temporary contracts, the reason justifying the temporary nature.
• Professional category or group.
• Remuneration: base salary, allowances, how variable pay is calculated and the criteria for receiving it.
• Working time: length and distribution of the schedule, cases in which it may change, overtime and its pay, and holidays.
• Irregular distribution of working time: the system for setting it, notice periods and, for permanent-seasonal workers, the periods of activity and inactivity.
• Probation period: length and conditions, with justification if the collective agreement extends it beyond six months.
• Right to training offered by the company.
• Equality plan and applicable LGTBI measures.
• Termination procedure, applicable collective agreement and the mutual insurance provider.
• For temporary-work agencies, identification of the user company.

The substantive change is the level of detail. It used to be enough to name the item and refer to the agreement; now the company has to spell out salary and working time. The “as per agreement” wording on pay or hours is over.

Two new elements worth flagging in red

Probation periods must be justified. A generic probation clause is not enough. The company must justify it in detail, and the underlying reason is that the Labour Inspectorate detects fraud in probation periods in up to 75% of the companies it investigates, a figure the Minister of Labour cited when presenting the rule. Extending probation beyond six months through the collective agreement requires specific justification.

Algorithms must be disclosed. If an automated system, a mathematical formula or an algorithmic instruction is involved in the job (for example in recruitment or in substantial changes to conditions), the company must specify it in detail. It is the first time a contractual information duty reaches into automated decision-making.

The deadlines your company handles

Two situations are easy to confuse:

• New contracts. From entry into force (20 days after publication in the BOE), every hire must include the extended information from the start.
• Contracts already in force. They remain valid even if they do not include every element. That said, the worker may request the missing information in writing, and the company has a maximum of 30 days to provide it. That deadline responds to each request; it is not a general window to readapt the whole workforce at once.

The Ministry of Labour will publish a model information document (and a specific one for fishers and seafarers) within a maximum of 20 days, giving companies a reference template to comply.

The rule applies to ordinary and special employment relationships, to civil servants and to public companies. The employers’ association CEOE has already announced it is studying an appeal, so some points may be contested in court later on.

The same wave as time recording

This obligation does not arrive in isolation. It shares its logic and legal basis with the Workers’ Statute and with the new Royal Decree on time recording: the company has to be able to document working conditions and prove they are met.

The point of contact is working time. The contract must now set the length and distribution of the schedule, overtime and its pay. Setting that on paper means little if there is no reliable way to prove how many hours were actually worked. That is where the contract and the time record meet: what one agrees, the other proves.

A time-recording software like Cleverfy covers that second half:

• Records the real clock-in and clock-out time with an unalterable timestamp.
• Separates ordinary from overtime hours and totals them each month.
• Keeps evidence of whether overtime is paid or compensated with rest.
• Generates the report ready for the Inspectorate or to answer a claim.

Documenting conditions in the contract and recording working time reliably are the same documentary discipline applied to two different moments of the relationship.

The upside if you use Cleverfy

All that documentation that is now mandatory (working time, schedule distribution, allowances, holiday policy) stops being dead paperwork and becomes the raw material Cleverfy needs to set itself up.

During sign-up or later, when you add each employee, you can hand that information to Cleverfy’s AI. From there it detects and proposes the configuration without you having to enter it field by field:

• It infers the schedule and the distribution of working time set out in the contract.
• It prepares the absence and holiday policies based on what you have documented.
• It tells apart the treatment of overtime that the collective agreement or the contract establishes.

The same detail the Royal Decree forces you to put in writing is what turns adding a worker from a long form into a quick review of what the AI has already filled in.

What to do now in your company

An orderly review avoids surprises when the first information request or the first inspection arrives:

1. Review the contract template and expand it with the missing essential elements, especially the salary and working-time detail.
2. Replace any “as per agreement” on pay or working time with the concrete information.
3. Check how the probation periods you are signing are justified.
4. Identify whether any process (recruitment, evaluation) involves an algorithm that must be disclosed.
5. Prepare a quick response to requests from workers with earlier contracts, within the 30-day deadline.
6. Make sure the time record proves what the contract now details about working time.

Once it is published in the BOE and the Ministry model is available, we will update this article with the official link.

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Legal notice: informational article, not legal advice. Based on the Royal Decree approved by the Council of Ministers on 8 September 2026 (pending publication in the BOE at the time of writing) and on Directive (EU) 2019/1152. Collective agreements may set specific conditions; check yours before making decisions.

Sources:

• Directive (EU) 2019/1152 on transparent and predictable working conditions
• BOE (pending publication)
• Ministry of Labour and Social Economy statement