In construction, working time records face a problem an office does not have: the workforce does not clock in at one door. It is spread across several sites at once, moves between them mid-week, and works in places where there is sometimes no mobile signal at all.
The legal obligation, however, is exactly the same. And construction concentrates a large share of labour inspection activity on working time.
This guide covers what the rules require today, what is about to change, and how it gets solved in practice when you run simultaneous sites with subcontractors coming and going.
What the law requires today
The baseline across the EU comes from the Court of Justice ruling of 14 May 2019 in case C-55/18. The Court held that member states must oblige employers to set up an objective, reliable and accessible system for measuring the duration of daily working time. Without it, the Court reasoned, the rights on maximum working hours and minimum rest periods cannot be verified.
National transpositions differ in the detail, but the recurring requirements are:
It applies to everyone. There is generally no headcount threshold. Contract type and part-time arrangements do not exempt anyone either.
Start and end times, not just totals. Recording that someone worked eight hours is usually not enough. What is required is the actual start and finish time of each person’s working day.
Records must be retained and available. Retention periods vary by country — four years in Spain, for instance — and the record must be available to the worker, their representatives and the labour inspectorate. A record that exists but cannot be produced is, in practice, no record at all.
The system is agreed, not imposed unilaterally. Most implementations require collective bargaining, a company agreement, or at minimum consultation with worker representatives.
Penalties
Failure to keep working time records is typically classed as a serious infringement carrying direct financial penalties, graded by criteria such as the number of workers affected, intent, repeat offending and the company’s size.
Two details matter more in construction than elsewhere:
- Penalties are often calculated per workplace. With several sites open and a systematic failure, you are not looking at one fine but at as many as the inspection report identifies.
- Some jurisdictions are moving to “per affected worker”. In Spain the reform currently in progress would do exactly that. For a contractor with a large workforce spread across sites, that change is significant.
What is about to change
Several member states are tightening their regimes in the same direction. Spain is a useful example because its draft decree is well advanced: approved for urgent processing in September 2025, separated from the working time reduction bill so it could move independently, and still resolving observations through 2026 before final approval.
The direction of travel worth watching:
- Digital records, with paper and spreadsheets expressly ruled out as an ordinary method.
- Personal and tamper-proof, so an entry cannot be altered afterwards without leaving a trace.
- Immediate remote access for the worker, their representatives and the inspectorate, without having to attend the workplace.
- Ordinary and overtime hours distinguished within the record itself.
- Penalties per affected worker rather than per company or workplace.
One caveat: until a reform is actually published and in force, what is enforceable is the existing framework. Any vendor telling you today that digital clock-in “is already mandatory” is getting ahead of the facts. That said, if you are replacing your system anyway, choosing one that already meets the anticipated requirements saves doing it twice.
The four problems specific to site work
This is where generic tools break.
Multiple simultaneous sites
A system designed for a single workplace records that someone started at 08:00. In construction you also need to know which site, because that data has two uses: meeting the legal obligation and knowing how many hours each project has absorbed. If the record does not distinguish the site, you have to reconstruct that separately — usually by hand and a week late.
No signal
Basements, steel structures, civil works far from urban areas. If clocking in requires connectivity at that exact moment, it is lost. The fix is not asking people to clock in once they reach the street — that falsifies the real time — but having the device store the entry locally with its genuine timestamp and sync later.
That the stored time is the moment of clock-in and not the moment of sync is precisely the kind of detail the “tamper-proof” requirement is meant to protect.
Subcontractors and turnover
Workers from several companies share a site. Each employer is responsible for its own records, but the principal contractor carries separate duties around site access control and document verification under national subcontracting rules.
In practice, whoever runs site access control properly is halfway there: they know who entered, when, and with which documents valid at that moment.
Moving between sites
If someone starts at one site and finishes the day at another, the record has to reflect the real working day without forcing the person to fight the app. The more steps the process has, the more the data degrades.
Choosing a system without getting it wrong
A short checklist, ordered by what fails most often on site:
| Requirement | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Works without signal | Otherwise you lose entries or falsify times |
| Identifies the site on each entry | Serves both compliance and per-project cost |
| Immutable record with audit trail | Anticipated in the reforms under way |
| Instant export for inspectors | Requests come with short deadlines |
| Worker access to their own record | Already required, reinforced by reforms |
| One-gesture clock-in | Every extra step degrades real compliance |
| Proportionate location handling | Avoids the data protection problem |
That last point deserves its own article, because it is where most companies go wrong: using GPS to clock in is lawful, but only if done in a very specific way. We cover it in the guide on GPS clock-in and data protection.
The expensive mistake: leaving it to the foreman
The pattern we see most often is this: each foreman notes their crew’s hours in a notebook or a spreadsheet, and at month end someone in the office transcribes it.
It fails in three ways at once. The data arrives late, so you discover cost overruns when you can no longer correct them. It is reconstructable, and therefore hard to defend under inspection. And it burns hours of a skilled person doing manual transcription.
The opportunity cost usually exceeds the cost of a tool well before any penalty appears.
Where to start
If you have nothing today, the order that works is:
- Cover the legal obligation first: daily records with start and end times, retained and accessible.
- Add the site to each entry, so the same effort also gives you real cost per project.
- Once that works, connect digital work reports and subcontractor access control.
Trying all three at once is the fastest route to site teams abandoning the system.
If you want the wider sector context, we have a page dedicated to construction software, and our mobile app development work covers the field-tool side of this.
This guide is indicative and does not constitute legal advice. Working time rules are under revision in several countries: check the current position in your jurisdiction before making decisions that affect your business.