Labour Ministry gives ground to the Council of State to pass time tracking in July

Legal note: This article is for information only and does not constitute legal advice. The Royal Decree described here is still going through the legislative process and has not been approved or published in the Official State Gazette (BOE) at the time of writing.

The Ministry of Labour has scaled back its demands on the two fronts where the Council of State pushed hardest. ABC reported it on 11 July: to approve digital time tracking before the August break, Yolanda Díaz’s department is now accepting changes it had been rejecting until a few months ago.

The regulation had been stalled since March, when the Council of State returned a scathing opinion running to more than a hundred pages. This was no minor drafting quibble: it challenged the project’s economic impact assessment, warned of the extra burden on small businesses, and questioned whether some obligations could be imposed by decree rather than by law.

The two points the Ministry is softening

The logjam is breaking thanks to two specific concessions.

The first is data protection. The text strengthens the safeguards over who can access the records and for what purpose, a weak spot the Council of State flagged because of the Labour Inspectorate’s remote access and the sheer volume of personal data that minute-by-minute clock-ins generate.

The second is the weight given to collective bargaining. Rather than a single mould for everyone, the regulation leaves more room for collective agreements to tailor time tracking to the reality of each sector. It is a direct response to the criticism that one and the same scheme does not fit a construction site, a restaurant and an office in the same way.

The underlying calculation is political. The Council of State suggested that part of the reform had the status of law, and taking it to Congress would have meant months of legislative process and a majority that is not guaranteed today. Softening precisely those points lets the Ministry keep the Royal Decree route, which bypasses Parliament. It is a concession on the substance in order not to lose speed.

That same concession has a flip side. Giving more play to collective agreements opens the door to the level of requirements ending up varying between sectors, something that companies operating across several fields will have to watch for once the final wording is published.

Why the rush

The calendar rules. The Ministry wants to take the text to the Cabinet meeting on 21 July, and failing that, to the one on the 28th. After that August begins and the institutional pace grinds to a halt.

On top of that there is union pressure. CCOO and UGT, the two main unions, have laid down an ultimatum: get time tracking through before the end of July or stop backing the Government in future deals. And internally the project carries a tug-of-war with Carlos Cuerpo’s Ministry of the Economy, which at one point held it up with two reports over the impact on small businesses.

What does not change for your company

Even though the legal wrapping has been negotiated, the core set of obligations affecting a small business still stands:

• Digital clock-in. Goodbye to paper, signed sheets and Excel.
• Tamper-proof records with traceability: every correction leaves a trail of who made it and when.
• Remote access for the Labour Inspectorate, with no need to show up at the workplace.
• Four-year retention.
• A tougher penalty regime, with fines that in the drafts reach up to 10,000 euros per affected worker.

One important nuance so you don’t get ahead of yourself: approving the decree in Cabinet is not the same as it coming into force. The draft itself provided for an adaptation period, so the likely outcome is a window to get up to speed before the obligation becomes enforceable. You’ll have to read the exact date in the wording published in the BOE.

The sensible thing in the meantime is not to wait until the last day. If your time tracking system is already digital, tamper-proof and easy to consult, the decree shouldn’t force you to change anything; if you still rely on a signature sheet, now is the time to act. At Cleverfy, our time tracking meets the technical requirements the regulation sets out, and you can see how it works by booking a demo.

We’ll keep updating this article as soon as the Royal Decree goes through the Cabinet and the final text is published.

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Sources: ABC (11 July 2026), Council of State opinion on the working-time record regulation (March 2026), statements by CCOO and UGT.