A lot of German employers are waiting for the working-time recording law to arrive before doing anything about it. That is an understandable reading of the news coverage and a costly one, because the obligation has been in force since September 2022.

Where the duty actually comes from

This is the part that causes the confusion, so it is worth being precise.

The Working Hours Act only requires you to record hours beyond the standard daily maximum, plus a register of employees who have agreed to extended hours. Those records are kept two years. If that were the whole picture, most employers would have very little to do.

It is not the whole picture. In September 2022 the Federal Labour Court held that employers are already obliged to record the entire working time of their employees, deriving that duty from the occupational safety legislation - specifically the obligation to provide a suitable organisation for carrying out health and safety measures.

So the duty is real, it is general, and it does not live where you would look for it. The amendment everyone is waiting for would move it into the Working Hours Act and add an electronic requirement. It would not create the obligation, because the obligation is already there.

What you have to record

Beginning, end and duration of daily working time, including breaks. Not just overtime. Not just the exceptions.

The court did not prescribe a system, which is the genuinely good news. There is no requirement to buy anything specific, and the anticipated amendment leans towards electronic recording rather than a particular product.

The trap in "we use trust-based working time"

Vertrauensarbeitszeit is often understood as an exemption. It is not one. You can continue to leave employees free to organise their own hours; what you cannot do is stop recording them. The two things are separable, and treating flexibility as a reason not to record is the single most common exposure among office employers.

For shift-based businesses the equivalent trap is assuming the rota is the record. A published schedule shows what was intended. The obligation is about what happened.

What a reasonable position looks like now

You do not need to predict the final text of the amendment to be in a defensible position. You need four things, and they are the same four the amendment will ask for.

  • Every employee's start, end and breaks captured daily, by whatever means suits the work.
  • Records that cannot be silently altered after the fact. Corrections are normal and necessary; an untraceable correction is the problem. A spreadsheet fails here, and spreadsheets are still extremely common.
  • A retention period you can actually meet. Two years under the Working Hours Act, and ten for anything tax-relevant, which in practice means payroll-adjacent records outlive the working-time ones.
  • Works council involvement where you have one. Introducing or changing a recording system is co-determined. Doing this without the Betriebsrat is how an otherwise sensible project stops for six months.

That last point is the one most often left until after a system has been chosen, which is exactly the wrong order.

The honest summary

The law you are waiting for will mostly formalise a duty that a court has already found to exist, and add the requirement that the record be electronic. If you are recording all working time in a form that cannot be quietly edited, the amendment will be an administrative event for you rather than a project.

If you are not, the gap is not with the future law. It is with the current one.

The amendment's final text will matter for the detail. The September 2022 decision is public, short, and considerably clearer than the commentary about it.