Updated 2026-07-15 · 4 min read
Who this is for. This is Spanish employment law, and it applies to salons in Spain — including the many run by owners who don't read Spanish. If your salon is in the United Kingdom, Ireland or the United States, this does not apply to you: your working-time records run under your own country's rules. If you employ anybody in Spain, read on.
You've spent months seeing headlines about «the end of the spreadsheet» and «fines of up to €10,000». Let's separate the noise from what actually affects you as a salon owner: what the new royal decree requires, how it differs from what already exists, and — the important bit — how to be ready without losing sleep over it. Because the reassuring news is that being compliant is easier today than it has ever been.
What was already compulsory (and plenty of people weren't doing)
Before the new rules, an uncomfortable reminder: keeping a record of working time has been compulsory since 2019 for every business with at least one employee. Start and finish times, every day, kept for four years. That plenty of salons kept it in a notebook — or didn't keep it at all — never made it legal: it meant an inspection hadn't come round yet.
What the new decree adds (the «how»)
The change isn't in *whether* you must record, but in *how*. The essentials the draft introduces:
- Digital only: no more paper and no more editable spreadsheets. The record has to be kept by reliable digital means.
- Tamper-proof and traceable: every entry is sealed, and any correction leaves a trace of who made it, when and why — with agreement between employer and employee.
- More detail: not only start and finish, but breaks too, ordinary and overtime hours with how they're compensated, and whether the work was on site or remote.
- Remote access for the Labour Inspectorate: inspectors will be able to consult the records at a distance, without setting foot in the salon.
- Training for your team: you'll have to train your staff in using the system, and that time counts as working time.
- Fines per employee: the draft proposes penalties for each person affected, not a single one per business — which multiplies the risk in salons with a team.
What does NOT change (so you can breathe)
Biometrics (fingerprint, face) remain restricted, so you don't have to buy any expensive fingerprint reader — in fact, better not to. Your obligation as the self-employed owner doesn't change either: clock in if you want to, but it isn't compulsory. And records are still kept for four years. Nor do you need any official «certificate» for your software: as things stand there is no official certification, so be wary of anybody selling you one.
How to be ready without the stress
Getting ready comes down to one sentence: have a digital time-record system that complies, and switch it on before you're forced to. The three steps:
1. Go digital now, even if the final deadline slips: the sooner you have digital records, the more history you build up for any inspection — which can arrive under the 2019 law, without waiting for the new decree.
2. Choose a tamper-proof, simple system: one your team clocks into in two taps, that can't be edited by hand, and that produces the report for the Inspectorate in one click. We explain how to choose it.
3. Train your team (it counts as working time) and keep the acknowledgement: it's a new requirement, and an easy one to meet if the system itself handles it.
If you work with ClaudIA this is included from the Pro plan and keeps itself up to date: when the law changes, your time record adapts without you buying anything new. Employment law evolves; the idea is that your tool evolves with it and you get on with your own job — the salon.