Property firm with no clock-in to pay €41,192 in overtime

A Madrid property management company will have to pay an employee €41,192.29 in overtime, plus 10% late-payment interest, because it had no clock-in system at all. The High Court of Justice of Madrid (TSJ) has upheld the award, calculated from a 610-row Excel sheet in which the worker himself logged his start time, his finish time and his lunch break. That comes to about 1,200 overtime hours over 16 months, between September 2022 and January 2024.

The ruling is STSJ M 11245/2026, of 18 September (Social Chamber, Section 1, appeal 54/2026). The worker, a university graduate, worked at the company’s office in central Madrid, on a gross salary of €60,000 a year. The judgment is not yet final and can be challenged before the Supreme Court through an appeal for the unification of doctrine.

What was in front of the court, and what was missing

The employee joined the company in April 2022 on a permanent contract, covered by the Madrid collective agreement for offices. He was dismissed in December 2023 and then claimed €45,311.51 in overtime plus another €30,000 for the treatment he says he received from his manager. Social Court No. 47 of Madrid did not rule on this second claim because it had not been included in the mandatory pre-trial conciliation request, and it upheld the first one almost in full.

The worker brought three things:

• The 610-row Excel sheet, one row per working day, with start, finish and lunch.
• His WhatsApp messages with the company. An independent IT expert testified at trial that there were no signs of tampering, and the messages showed him working on Saturdays, Sundays, public holidays and during his holidays.
• His own testimony.

The company produced no time records because, as the judgment notes, it had no time recording system. Using the rates in the collective agreement (€33.99 per overtime hour before 10 pm and about €36 after that, plus the 20% night-work supplement the agreement applies to night hours), the court recognised 1,099 daytime overtime hours and 106 night-time ones.

Why the company’s appeal failed

The company appealed on seven grounds and the TSJ rejected all of them. These are the three main ones.

That the Excel sheet was just the worker’s own say-so. The Chamber replies that the award does not rest on that document alone, but also on the WhatsApp messages authenticated by the expert and on the worker’s testimony. It adds that the lack of records is attributable solely to the company, because article 34.9 of the Workers’ Statute places the obligation on the company, and that failure “cannot work to the detriment of the worker nor benefit the company, which could well have refuted the overtime hours claimed on the basis of the working time record it failed to keep” (“no puede revertir en perjuicio del trabajador ni beneficiar a la empresa, que bien pudo refutar las horas extraordinarias reclamadas sobre la base de ese registro de jornada que no ha llevado a efecto”).

That the worker had flexible hours. The company wanted to add to the proven facts that the employee set his own start and finish times and could leave to run personal errands. The TSJ considers this immaterial: what matters is the excess over ordinary working hours, and article 34.9 itself requires the start and end of each working day to be recorded “without prejudice to flexible working hours” (“sin perjuicio de la flexibilidad horaria”). Without records, the company could not show that this flexibility offset the extra hours either.

That one day of sick leave should be deducted. The company spotted 4 hours and 34 minutes logged in the Excel sheet on the day the worker went on sick leave, worth about €155. The TSJ did not consider it because it was a new issue the company had not raised at trial.

STS 372/2026 applied to office work

The Chamber cites STS 372/2026, of 15 April, the Supreme Court ruling that distinguishes between irregular and fixed schedules. With a fixed schedule, the worker has to provide evidence that he worked beyond it, and once he does, the burden shifts to the company, which would have to prove with its time records that there was no excess.

Here the evidence was solid: an Excel sheet with specific hours day by day and work messages sent at weekends and during holidays, authenticated by an expert, while the company had no records to compare them against. The same section of the Madrid TSJ, with the same reporting judge and the same doctrine, ruled the opposite way a week earlier in the case of a tobacconist’s shop where the worker had not requested the records or provided any evidence, and an earlier judgment had already set his working hours. We cover it in our STS 372 article, in the section on how the regional High Courts are applying it.

In our view, without records the company could only quibble over details in someone else’s document (a visit to a workshop one afternoon, a day of sick leave), never put forward its own figure for hours worked. With a record, even an imperfect one, it would have had its own timesheet to set against the worker’s.

What a company with office staff can review

The time recording obligation applies to a professional office just as much as to a restaurant or a factory. This ruling gives any company with office staff three concrete takeaways:

• Offering flexible hours does not exempt you from recording the start and finish of each day (article 34.9 of the Workers’ Statute).
• Work messages outside working hours count as evidence. If an employee answers WhatsApp messages or emails on a Saturday, that can end up in court as evidence of overtime, and without records there is nothing to compare it against.
• If the company wants to dispute the hours the worker claims, it has to do so at first instance, because new issues are not admitted on appeal.

There is also an administrative risk this lawsuit does not touch. Some 1,200 overtime hours in 16 months far exceed the legal limit of 80 overtime hours per year, and failing to keep time records is a serious infringement under article 7.5 of the LISOS (Spain’s law on labour infringements and sanctions), which the Labour Inspectorate can sanction regardless of what happens in court. If you are unsure how those hours are paid or compensated, we explain it in is overtime paid or compensated with time off?.

The new Royal Decree on digital time recording is still going through the approval process and has no publication date in the BOE (Spain’s Official State Gazette). The obligation to record daily working hours has been in force since 2019 for every company with employees, including an office with a single employee.

How Cleverfy solves it

Cleverfy is time tracking and working time recording software for SMEs and self-employed professionals. In a company with office staff, it gives the business its own figure for hours worked, the one that was missing in this case:

• Clock in from a computer or phone, in the browser, with the Chrome extension or with the app, with nothing to install on the workstation. It distinguishes between on-site and remote work.
• Flexible hours that work with the record: each person clocks their actual start and finish times, and the system calculates the effective working day including breaks.
• Automatic overtime calculation and alerts for the legal limit of 80 hours per year, before the excess builds up.
• Missed clock-in reminders for the employee and alerts for the manager, so no days are left blank.
• A history of every correction, showing who requested it, who approved it and why, which is what gives the record its value as evidence if anyone makes a claim.

If you want to see how it works for an office team, take a look at our time tracking software for offices, try it free for 14 days or book a demo. Our plans are on the pricing page.

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This article is general information about a specific court ruling, which is not yet final, and does not constitute legal advice. For specific situations, consult an employment lawyer.

Sources:

• STSJ M 11245/2026, of 18 September (Madrid TSJ, Social Chamber, appeal 54/2026), CENDOJ
• Workers’ Statute, arts. 34.9 and 35
• LISOS (Royal Legislative Decree 5/2000), art. 7.5