Vacation, public holidays and overtime: how to show them in your time records in Spain

General information about Spanish employment law, checked on October 18, 2026 against the official gazette (BOE). It is not legal advice: your collective agreement (convenio colectivo) may improve on or spell out what is explained here, so check it and talk to your employment advisor.

Since May 2019, every company in Spain with employees has had to keep a daily record of their working hours. The rule is short and covers the essentials. The days that are not a normal working day (a public holiday, a vacation day, an evening of overtime) raise the most questions, and in December they all come at once.

For the full picture of the obligation, read what Spain's time tracking law requires today. Here we focus on those other days.

What the record has to contain

"The company shall guarantee a daily record of working hours, which must include the specific start and end time of each employee's working day, without prejudice to the flexible working hours established in this article."

Article 34.9 of the Workers' Statute (our translation)

Every day, for every employee, the time their working day starts and ends. How the record is kept is set by collective agreement or company agreement or, failing that, by the company after consulting the employees' legal representatives, and it has to be documented. Records are kept for four years and must be available to each employee, their representatives and the Labor and Social Security Inspectorate (same article).

The law does not require a specific format, but the system must give reliable information that cannot be tampered with afterward (Ministry of Labor guide, section B.2), and it must be objective, reliable and accessible (Court of Justice of the EU, case C-55/18).

Vacation, public holidays and paid leave: days off you need to be able to explain

On a vacation day, a public holiday or a day of paid leave there is no working day, so there is no start or end time to record. The problem shows up later: a month of records full of gaps. If the Inspectorate or the employee looks at it, each gap needs an explanation. The law does not say it in these words, but the practical answer is for the record, or the absence log that goes with it, to state why there was no working day: vacation, public holiday, paid leave or sick leave.

Vacation

Employees in Spain get at least 30 calendar days of paid vacation a year, which cannot be swapped for money. Dates are set by mutual agreement, in line with the collective agreement's annual planning, and each employee must know their dates at least two months before the vacation starts (article 38 of the Workers' Statute).

Plan ahead: if you want December 24 to be a vacation day, the employee needs to know that date by October 24 at the latest.

Public holidays

Public holidays are paid and cannot be made up: there can be no more than fourteen a year, two of them local (article 37.2). "Cannot be made up" means you cannot ask employees to work those hours on another day.

For December 2026, according to the official list of public holidays: December 8 (Immaculate Conception) and December 25 (Christmas Day) are holidays in every region; Constitution Day, December 6, falls on a Sunday and several regions move the day off to Monday, December 7; and December 26 (St. Stephen's Day) is a holiday in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. On top of that come each town's two local holidays. The 2027 list is already in the BOE if you want to plan next year's work calendar.

Paid leave and sick leave

The paid leave in article 37.3 is not time worked, but it has to be accounted for. It includes, among others: 15 calendar days for marriage or registering a domestic partnership; five days for an accident, serious illness or hospitalization of a spouse, domestic partner, relative up to the second degree, or someone living with the employee who needs their care; two days for the death of a spouse, domestic partner or relative up to the second degree, plus two more if travel is needed; one day for moving house; and the time needed to carry out a public duty. The same goes for urgent family absences under article 37.9.

With sick leave, be careful with health data: whoever reviews the time records to check working hours does not need to know the medical reason, and the data processed must be limited to what is necessary (article 5.1.c of the GDPR). For that purpose, "authorized absence" is usually enough.

In UTILIA OS, absences sit next to time tracking: 17 types, from vacation to compensatory time off, with multi-level approval and a per-person annual balance for vacation, personal days and compensatory time off. The export for the Labor Inspectorate explains the days without entries, such as a public holiday or a vacation day.

Overtime: what it is, how much, and how it is compensated

Overtime is any hour worked beyond the maximum length of the ordinary working day. The collective agreement or, failing that, the employment contract decides whether it is paid, never below the value of an ordinary hour, or compensated with equivalent paid time off. If nothing has been agreed, it is compensated with time off within the following four months (article 35.1 of the Workers' Statute).

• A cap of 80 hours a year, reduced proportionally if the employee's annual working time is shorter than the company's standard (35.2).
• Not counted toward the cap: hours compensated with time off within the following four months (35.2), and hours worked to prevent or repair accidents and other extraordinary, urgent damage, which are still compensated as overtime (35.3).
• Voluntary, unless agreed in the collective agreement or the contract (35.4).
• Night workers (those who normally work at least three hours of their daily shift between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., or are expected to work a third of their annual hours in that window) cannot work overtime (article 36.1).

How overtime is recorded

Article 35.5 requires each employee's working hours to be recorded day by day and totaled for each pay period, with a copy of the summary given to the employee with the corresponding pay slip. The daily record under article 34.9 can serve both purposes (Ministry of Labor guide, section D).

Employee representatives are also entitled to monthly information from the company on overtime worked, however it is compensated, with a copy of those summaries (third additional provision of Royal Decree 1561/1995).

For December: if you have a busy season, check each person's overtime for the year before asking for more. And if you plan to compensate it with days off in January, remember that only hours compensated with time off within the following four months stay outside the cap.

UTILIA OS tracks each person's overtime against the 80-hour annual cap in article 35, with an alert at 80 percent.

Part-time employees: a daily record and a monthly summary

This is the strictest case. Hours are recorded day by day and totaled each month, and the employee receives, with the pay slip, a copy of the summary of all hours worked that month, both ordinary and complementary. Monthly summaries must be kept for at least four years. If you do not comply, the contract is presumed to be full-time unless proven otherwise (article 12.4.c of the Workers' Statute).

Part-time employees cannot work overtime, except under article 35.3. If you need more hours from a part-time employee in December, those are complementary hours (horas complementarias): they can only be required under an express written agreement, and that agreement is only possible in contracts of at least ten hours a week on an annual basis (article 12.5). Ordinary plus complementary hours also cannot exceed the legal limit for part-time work (article 12.4.c).

Common December mistakes

The holiday dinner

Is it working time? It depends on how it is set up. EU law defines working time as any period during which the worker is "working, at the employer's disposal and carrying out his activity or duties" (article 2 of Directive 2003/88/EC). A voluntary dinner outside working hours normally is not, and is not recorded. If you make it mandatory or hold it during working hours, check your collective agreement and ask your employment advisor before deciding how to record it.

Closing on December 24 and 31

They are not national public holidays. If you close, decide in advance what those days are, because the record has to reflect it:

• Vacation: by mutual agreement and in line with the collective agreement, known two months in advance (article 38).
• Days your collective agreement grants, such as personal days: on the terms it sets.
• Hours made up on another day: an irregular distribution of working time is agreed in the collective agreement or with the employee representatives; without an agreement, the company can distribute 10% of the working time irregularly over the year, respecting rest periods and giving five days' notice of the day and time to be worked (article 34.2).
• A paid day off that is not made up: paid leave granted by the company.

What does not work is leaving it blank and deciding in February what it was.

Shifts and working on public holidays

If someone works on December 25 or January 1, that day is recorded like any other. When, exceptionally and for technical or organizational reasons, the holiday cannot be taken, the company pays those hours with a premium of at least 75%, unless compensatory time off is given (article 47 of Royal Decree 2001/1983, still in force). Your collective agreement may improve on this.

With shifts, keep at least twelve hours between the end of one working day and the start of the next (article 34.3) and the weekly rest of a day and a half (article 37.1), including in weeks with holidays.

Missed entries around long weekends

With vacation and long weekends, people forget to clock out. Fixing an entry is fine; rewriting it without a trace is not: the information must be unchangeable and not open to manipulation afterward (Ministry of Labor guide, section B.2). Keep a note of who made the correction, when and why.

Working from home over the holidays

Employees working from home these weeks also record their hours, including when they start and finish (article 14 of Law 10/2021 on remote work).

UTILIA OS detects nine types of incident on its own, such as a missing clock-out, and every entry is sealed with a SHA-256 fingerprint.

Four years, available to whoever is entitled to ask

Records are kept for four years and must be available to each employee, their representatives and the Labor Inspectorate (article 34.9). Available means they can be consulted as soon as someone asks, at the workplace or from it (Ministry of Labor guide, section C.2).

The law does not require you to hand over copies of the daily record, unless agreed, but each employee must be able to consult their own (same guide, C.2). What you do hand over is the overtime summary with each pay period's pay slip (article 35.5) and, for part-time employees, the monthly summary with the pay slip (article 12.4.c).

What the Labor Inspectorate penalizes

Breaching the rules or limits on working time, night work, overtime, complementary hours, rest, vacation, paid leave and time records is a serious offense under Spain's law on labor offenses and penalties (LISOS, article 7.5).

The fine is per offense, not per employee. To set the grade, the Inspectorate weighs negligence or intent, ignored warnings and prior requirements, the company's revenue, the number of people affected and the harm caused (article 39.2). For part-time work, there is also the full-time presumption in article 12.4.c of the Workers' Statute.

What was proposed and is not law

The 2025 bill that combined a 37.5-hour working week with stronger time-recording rules proposed higher fines calculated per affected employee. Spain's Congress sent it back to the government in September 2025, so it is not law. And the royal decree on digital records, which has not been approved, could not change those amounts anyway: they are set in LISOS, which has the rank of law.

How UTILIA OS handles it

Time tracking in UTILIA OS is part of the HR module, included in the Professional and Advanced plans:

• Each person clocks in, out and on breaks from the browser, the iPhone app or a QR code that expires every 30 seconds.
• Every entry is sealed with a SHA-256 fingerprint, and records are kept for four years.
• Absences, with their 17 types and approvals, live in the same place as time tracking.
• Overtime is tracked against the 80-hour annual cap, with an alert at 80 percent.
• Records export for the Labor Inspectorate in PDF, Excel, CSV and XML, with the days without entries explained.
• No biometrics.

The tool records and keeps. How time recording is organized in your company (collective agreement, consulting representatives, breaks, how overtime is compensated) is still your decision. See how it works on the time tracking page.

UTILIA OS and its AI do not replace professional advice from your tax advisor, accountant, lawyer or financial analyst.

December is also year-end: see what to get in order before the 31st in our year-end checklist for a small business in Spain.

Sources

Consolidated texts from the BOE and official pages, checked on October 18, 2026. Spanish sources are in Spanish; quotations from them are our translation.

1. Workers’ Statute (Estatuto de los Trabajadores, Royal Legislative Decree 2/2015) Consolidated text, last update published on October 3, 2026. Articles 12.4.c and 12.5 (part-time work and complementary hours), 34.2, 34.3 and 34.9 (working time and time records), 35 (overtime), 36.1 (night work), 37 (weekly rest, public holidays and paid leave) and 38 (vacation).
2. Law on Offenses and Penalties in the Social Order (LISOS, Royal Legislative Decree 5/2000) Articles 7.5 (serious offense), 39.2 (grading) and 40.1.b (amounts).
3. Royal Decree 1561/1995 on special working hours Third additional provision: monthly information to employee representatives on overtime.
4. Royal Decree 2001/1983 on working hours and rest Only articles 45, 46 and 47, on public holidays, remain in force. Article 47 covers work on a public holiday.
5. Resolution of October 17, 2025, of the Directorate General of Labor List of public holidays for 2026 (BOE of October 28, 2025).
6. Resolution of October 8, 2026, of the Directorate General of Labor List of public holidays for 2027 (BOE of October 13, 2026).
7. Law 10/2021 on remote work Article 14: time records for remote work.
8. Directive 2003/88/EC concerning certain aspects of the organization of working time Article 2: definition of working time.
9. Regulation (EU) 2016/679, General Data Protection Regulation Article 5.1.c: data minimization.
10. Spanish Ministry of Labor, guide on time records (Guía sobre el registro de jornada, 2019) Non-binding criteria from the Directorate General of Labor. Cited by section (B.2, C.2, D).
11. Court of Justice of the European Union, judgment of May 14, 2019, case C-55/18 Time recording systems must be objective, reliable and accessible.
12. Spanish Council of State, opinion 188/2026 of March 19, 2026 On the draft royal decree on time records: “no procede aprobar el Real Decreto proyectado” (the draft should not be approved).