Employee Time Tracking Requirements in the UK: What Employers Must Record

What the Working Time Regulations ask you to record

Regulation 9 of the Working Time Regulations 1998 requires records adequate to show whether you comply with the limits the Regulations set, kept for two years from the date they were made. An amendment in force from 1 January 2024 (SI 2023/1426) added two points: you may keep those records in any manner and format you reasonably think fit, and you need not record each worker's daily hours if you can show compliance another way. The 48-hour limit is an average, normally worked out over 17 weeks, and a worker can choose to opt out of it. The opt-out must be voluntary and in writing, and gov.uk states that the employer must keep a record of it. The 1998 Regulations extend to Great Britain only; Northern Ireland has the Working Time Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2016. In practice, your records need to cover the following.

• Weekly hours for each worker, so the 17-week average can be checked.
• Hours of anyone who counts as a night worker, and the health assessments you offered them.
• Hours of workers under 18, who have their own limits.
• Signed 48-hour opt-out agreements, kept with each worker's file.

Minimum wage records: six years and the burden of proof

The stricter rule comes from minimum wage law. Records proving you pay the National Minimum Wage or National Living Wage must be kept for at least six years if they were created on or after 1 April 2021, and they must show total pay and total hours worked, including absences and overtime. They can be on paper or on a computer, but you must be able to produce the records for a single pay reference period in one document. In a dispute, government guidance is clear that the burden is on the employer to prove the minimum wage was paid. A worker with reasonable grounds to believe they were underpaid can ask to see their records, and you have 14 days to produce them unless you agree another period with the worker. If you refuse or fail to, the worker can complain to an employment tribunal, which, if it upholds the complaint, will award them 80 times the hourly minimum wage rate. For anyone paid close to the minimum, the hours record is what proves you paid enough, which is why a daily record remains the safest choice even though working time law no longer demands one.

Why a daily record is still worth keeping

The 2024 change removed a duty, not the reasons for recording time. Several other rules can only be checked against the hours actually worked, and they matter in a seasonal trade where long summer weeks follow quiet winter ones.

• Rest: an uninterrupted 20-minute break for anyone working more than 6 hours a day, 11 hours' rest between working days, and 24 hours off each week or 48 hours each fortnight (gov.uk, Rest breaks at work).
• Holiday for irregular-hours and part-year workers: for leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024, entitlement is 12.07% of the hours worked in each pay period (gov.uk, Holiday entitlement).
• Travel time: Acas says travel between jobs during the working day will usually count as working time, and that for workers with no fixed workplace, travel between home and work is likely to count too. A marine engineer moving between marinas is a typical case.
• Overtime: employers do not have to pay for overtime, provided average pay for all hours worked stays at or above the minimum wage (gov.uk, Overtime: your rights). Any overtime rate therefore comes from the contract, and the hours record is what it is paid on.

A worked example: one week for a mobile marine engineer

A fictional example to show the mechanics: the business, the engineer and the times don't exist. A boatyard on the Solent employs a marine engineer who works on boats at several marinas. He has no fixed start time, so the yard records each day as it happens rather than assuming a standard shift.

• Monday: 07:30 to 16:45 at the yard, 30-minute break: 8h 45m worked.
• Tuesday: in at the yard at 07:15, aboard a boat at a nearby marina from 09:00, back at the yard after lunch, off at 17:30 with a 30-minute break: 9h 45m.
• Wednesday: in at 07:40, with no clock-out. The history flags the day as still open at midnight; he confirms he finished at 16:10, the office corrects the entry and the change is logged. With a 30-minute break: 8h 00m.
• Thursday: 07:30 to 18:00, 45-minute break: 9h 45m.
• Friday: 07:30 to 13:30 with no break, since the day is not more than 6 hours: 6h 00m.
• Week total: 42h 15m. Rest between Tuesday's finish (17:30) and Wednesday's start (07:40) is 14h 10m, above the 11 hours required. The week counts towards his 17-week average, which must stay at or below 48 hours unless he has opted out.

GPS at clock-in and UK GDPR

Recording a location when someone clocks in is a form of monitoring, so UK GDPR applies. The ICO's guidance on monitoring workers, published in October 2023 and currently flagged by the ICO as under review following the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, sets the baseline. You must tell workers about monitoring in a way that is accessible and easy to understand. You must be clear about your purpose, choose the least intrusive means and identify a lawful basis. You must carry out a data protection impact assessment before any processing likely to result in a high risk, and the ICO recommends one even where the risk is lower. Its vehicle example is telling: tracking during working hours, with a system the driver can switch off outside work. A location captured only at the moment of clocking in is far less intrusive than continuous tracking, but it still needs a reason. If you want to confirm that an engineer reached the right marina, say so in your privacy notice. If you have no use for it, don't collect it.

Seafarers and yacht crew: different rules

Gov.uk lists seafarers, sea-fishermen and inland waterway workers among those not covered by the 48-hour limit, and Acas notes that these jobs have their own working time laws. On seagoing UK ships, and for some provisions on other ships while in UK waters, the Merchant Shipping (Maritime Labour Convention) (Hours of Work) Regulations 2018 set minimum rest of 10 hours in any 24-hour period and 77 hours in any 7-day period. They also require the master, or a person the master authorises, to record each seafarer's daily hours of rest, with the record endorsed by the master and the seafarer. Those Regulations do not apply to pleasure vessels or to vessels not ordinarily engaged in commercial activities. A yacht's flag and its use therefore decide which rules govern its crew, so check with the flag administration or a maritime lawyer before you settle on a system. Shore staff working for the same company, such as yard engineers and office teams, stay under the Working Time Regulations.

A checklist for UK marine employers

You don't need an expensive system to get this right. You need a few decisions made once, written down and applied the same way every pay period.

• Separate shore staff covered by the Working Time Regulations from seafarers covered by maritime rules.
• Record start and finish times as they happen, on the device people carry at work, not from memory at the end of the week.
• Agree who may correct a time entry, and keep a trail of every correction: who changed it, when, and what it said before.
• Check weekly hours against the 17-week average for anyone working long weeks in season, and keep signed opt-outs on file.
• Keep working time records for two years and minimum wage records for six, and state the retention period in your privacy notice.
• Let each person see their own hours, so disagreements surface within days rather than months.
• Tell staff what is recorded at clock-in, including any location, and run a DPIA if the monitoring could be high risk.
• Send your payroll bureau totals per pay period with the day-by-day detail behind them.

Where Captain Crews fits, and where it doesn't

Captain Crews records clock-ins on a phone (workshop, on board, break, end of day) using the server's time, not the phone's. A location is captured at each clock-in whenever the phone provides one; it can be made optional per employee, so clocking in works without it, and nobody is tracked continuously. Office corrections go into an audit log, missed clock-outs are flagged in the history and each person can see their own hours. It does not calculate the 17-week average, check rest breaks, accrue holiday or keep seafarers' hours-of-rest records.