The Dutch working-time rule is unusually relaxed about form and unusually specific about purpose, and employers tend to hear the first half.
The Arbeidstijdenwet requires a deugdelijke registratie - a sound registration - of the working and rest times of your employees. It is vormvrij: no prescribed format, no mandated system, no official form. You decide how.
What you cannot decide is what it has to prove.
The test is whether compliance can be derived from it
The registration has to be such that it can be established from it whether your organisation is keeping to the rules. That is the whole standard, and it is a functional one rather than a formal one.
So the question to ask of your own records is not "do we have times written down". It is: could someone read this and tell whether we complied? If your record is a list of shift start and end times with no breaks, no one can tell from it whether daily rest was respected, whether breaks were taken, or whether anyone exceeded the maximum. It is a record, but it is not a deugdelijke one.
Rest times, not just working times
This is the part that catches people, and it follows directly from the point above. The Act names working times and rest times. Most systems record when people were at work and treat the gaps as self-evident.
They are not self-evident when the question is compliance. Whether someone had eleven hours between shifts, or a proper break in a long shift, is a fact about the gap - and the gap is exactly what a record of working times alone leaves implicit.
For shift businesses this is the practical difference between a registration that survives a look from the Nederlandse Arbeidsinspectie and one that does not.
52 weeks, from when the time occurred
The registration is kept at least 52 weeks, and the clock starts from the moment the recorded working and rest times took place - not from the end of the year, not from when payroll ran.
A rolling 52 weeks is administratively slightly awkward and worth automating rather than doing by hand, because the failure mode is silent: nobody notices that last February is gone until somebody asks for it.
Note also that 52 weeks is short. Other obligations on the same data run longer, and the Inspectorate is not the only party who may ask, so treat it as the floor it is.
What the freedom is actually for
The vormvrij principle is genuinely useful and not a loophole. A small café can keep a sound registration on paper. A hospital cannot, but not because paper is forbidden - because at that scale nothing else can show compliance across hundreds of people.
The right reading is that the Act cares about the outcome and trusts you to pick a means proportionate to your operation. It also means nobody can sell you a system on the grounds that the law demands it. The law demands a result.
A short checklist
- Do your records show rest as well as work? If breaks and between-shift gaps are implicit, that is the gap.
- Could someone establish compliance from them without knowing your business?
- Do you still have last February? 52 rolling weeks, per record.
- Is the format proportionate? Paper is legal. It is also unmanageable above a certain size, and both halves of that are your call rather than the law's.
The Nederlandse Arbeidsinspectie publishes its own working instruction on the Act, which is written for inspectors and is therefore the most direct statement of what they will actually look at.