Spain’s 37.5-hour workweek law: What employers need to know in 2026

Spain’s proposed 37.5-hour workweek has created more confusion than change. The reduction from 40 to 37.5 hours was approved as a draft bill in 2025, but the Congress of Deputies later rejected it. As of 2026, Spain’s statutory maximum ordinary working week therefore remains 40 hours, averaged over the year.

Employers should still pay close attention to the reform. Collective agreements may already set shorter working weeks, and the rejected proposal also signalled the likely direction of future rules on digital timekeeping, overtime records, and the right to disconnect. Before changing contracts or schedules, employers should first confirm the collective agreement that applies to each role and separate current obligations from measures that remain only proposals.

The 37.5-hour week is a rejected proposal, not current law. Spain’s statutory maximum ordinary working week remains 40 hours per week of effective work, averaged over the year, under Article 34.1 of the Workers’ Statute. That 40-hour ceiling has stood since 1983, and nothing in the 2025 reform effort changed it.

The timeline matters for anyone assessing exposure. On 4 February 2025, the Council of Ministers agreed on the outline of the reduction with the two largest trade unions, CCOO and UGT. On 6 May 2025, the Council of Ministers approved a draft bill to cut the maximum working day to 37.5 hours, then sent it to the Congress of Deputies to begin parliamentary processing. La Moncloa framed it as the first reduction of statutory working time since 1983.

That text never reached the Official State Gazette (BOE). On 10 September 2025 the lower house rejected the bill by 178 votes to 170, after the Catalan party Junts sided with the Partido Popular and Vox to block it. The proposal was returned to the government without being able to continue its parliamentary process, and specialist employment commentators describe the initiative as stalled. The government has said it intends to try again, but there is no confirmed timetable or text for a fresh bill.

The practical takeaway is that any 37.5-hour workweeks operating in Spain today come from sectoral collective agreements or company policies, not from the Workers’ Statute. Some public-sector and financial-services agreements already sit at or below 37.5 hours. The statutory reference point that contracts fall back on, absent a shorter collective agreement, is still 40 hours.

The core measure was an amendment to Article 34.1 of the Workers’ Statute, lowering the maximum ordinary working day from 40 to 37.5 hours per week on an annual average. The draft kept working time as agreed in collective agreements or contracts, but capped the ordinary maximum at 37.5 hours. Crucially, the proposal ruled out any proportional pay cut: the same monthly or annual salary would apply to fewer hours, which the government presented as a way to share productivity gains without reducing wages.

The government estimated roughly 12.5 million workers would have benefited, split into about 10.5 million full-time and 2 million part-time workers, concentrated in commerce, manufacturing, hospitality, and construction. The bill did not carve out specific industries. It set a general ceiling and relied on collective bargaining, or the most representative unions, where no agreement applied, to reshape working patterns within the new limit. Agreements already below 37.5 hours could stand; those at or above 40 hours would have needed revision.

Two structural mechanics are worth flagging for anyone modelling the impact:

• Part-time conversion: Part-time contracts with weekly hours equal to or above 37.5 would have been automatically converted into full-time contracts, closing the gap where near-full-time work is engaged on a part-time basis.
• Proportional salary protection: Companies would have raised pay proportionally for part-time workers and for those on reduced hours through legal guardianship who kept working the same hours.

Transitional provisions gave businesses until 31 December 2025 to adapt working hours and put the associated systems in place, with a transition period of roughly six months cited in practical guidance for updating timekeeping and collective agreements. Because Parliament rejected the bill, those deadlines are indicative rather than binding, but they signal the kind of runway a renewed reform might offer.

The 37.5-hour cap travelled with two companion measures that reached further into day-to-day HR operations than the headline number suggests. Understanding them now matters because a future bill would likely carry the same package, and the digital time-recording strand is also moving on a separate track.

Spain already requires employers to keep daily records of working time, an obligation added to the Workers’ Statute by Royal Decree-Law 8/2019. Current rules allow various formats, including reliable manual or paper systems. The 2025 draft bill would have upgraded this through a new Article 34 bis mandating digital, interoperable, tamper-proof systems. Key features described in the draft included:

• Digital records in place of paper-based methods.
• Real-time logging of the start and end of the workday, plus relevant breaks and interruptions.
• Interoperability so that records could be shared with Labour Inspectorate platforms, including remote access for inspectors.
• Employee involvement, with staff personally recording their hours, and access for workers, their representatives, and inspectors.

Separately from the rejected bill, a draft Royal Decree to standardise digital working-time records has been circulated for public consultation. It could be approved independently of any change to the weekly maximum, and it contemplates extending time-recording to all contract types, including senior executives previously outside the general duty, plus an official registry of approved digital tools. Its final form and entry-into-force date are not yet fixed.

The second companion measure strengthened the right to digital disconnection already recognised in Article 20 bis of the Workers’ Statute since 2018. The bill would have made that right expressly unwaivable, required collective bargaining to set concrete rules for out-of-hours contact, and established that ignoring communications outside working hours must not trigger disciplinary action or lost opportunities. Legal commentary flags this as most consequential for remote and hybrid teams, where the line between working and non-working time blurs. Some reporting also described a complementary digital document, attached to the payslip, detailing total hours worked and their classification as ordinary or extraordinary.

Enforcement is where the rejected reform would have changed the calculus most sharply for employers, so it is worth reading these figures as a signal of intent rather than as current liability. Under existing law, the Labour Inspectorate can already demand working-time records and check compliance with hours, overtime, and rest rules, and record-keeping breaches are sanctioned under the Law on Infringements and Sanctions in the Social Order (LISOS), generally counted per company or workplace.

The draft bill sharpened this in three ways. It classified failures to keep accurate working-time records as serious infringements under Article 7.5 LISOS. It shifted the counting unit from per company to per affected worker. And it introduced a presumption of overtime where registers did not comply, moving the burden of proof onto the employer. The proposed fine structure, per affected worker, ran from about €1,000 to €10,000 depending on severity, described in press coverage as a tiered scale:

These figures are proposals tied to the rejected bill, not currently applicable law. Existing LISOS sanctions for working-time and record-keeping breaches still apply per company or workplace until a new law changes the counting unit. The strengthened right to disconnect carried its own enforcement edge: penalising a worker for declining out-of-hours contact could have been treated as a breach of labour obligations, with collective agreements setting complaint procedures and inspectors assessing whether disconnection was genuinely respected.

The reason legal commentators watched this strand closely is the second-order exposure. More rigorous digital time records, combined with a presumption of overtime where registers fall short, could surface unpaid overtime that has gone unrecorded, and with it the prospect of back-pay liabilities. Employer associations raised a related concern about the headline reduction itself, warning that a statutory 37.5-hour cap without pay cuts could raise labour costs and strain competitiveness, particularly for smaller companies and sectors running on thin margins. Those competing pressures, worker protection on one side and cost on the other, are part of why the reform proved politically hard to pass and why a future version could look different.

Because a renewed 37.5-hour bill is a live possibility rather than a certainty, the sensible posture is readiness, not overhaul. The steps below let you audit exposure and build optionality without acting on a law that does not yet exist. Work through them in order.

1. Map every applicable collective agreement: Identify the sectoral and company-level agreements that govern working time for the team in Spain, and note where each already sets hours below the 40-hour statutory ceiling. Many working-time obligations in Spain already sit in collective agreements rather than the statute, so this map is the foundation for any future adaptation.
2. Flag contracts above 37.5 hours: List employees whose contractual or practical weekly hours exceed 37.5, and model what a reduction without a pay cut would cost, including overtime, additional hires, or shift changes.
3. Review near-full-time and part-time contracts: Single out part-time contracts at or close to 37.5 hours, since these were the ones the draft bill would have converted automatically to full-time status with proportional pay.
4. Audit your timekeeping method: Compare your current records against the direction of travel: digital, real-time, interoperable, and accessible to workers and inspectors. Even under today’s rules, the daily record is mandatory, so a paper-based setup is worth revisiting regardless of the reform.
5. Draft a digital disconnection policy: Set out that employees are not required to answer communications outside working hours, define urgent-escalation exceptions, and configure email and messaging tools to respect working-time boundaries.
6. Brief managers: Train the people who set schedules and respond to overtime not to penalise staff for exercising disconnection rights, and keep a watching brief on the separate Royal Decree on digital time records that could advance on its own.

For companies without a Spanish entity, the mechanics of staying current with these rules sit with whoever runs local employment. This is where a workforce management platform earns its place: rather than tracking Spanish working-time reform yourself, you engage and pay team members through licensed local infrastructure that absorbs the compliance monitoring. Boundless keeps its country practice aligned to Spanish employment law as it changes, which matters precisely because the working-time picture is unsettled. For the workforce planning side, our Spain hiring guide covers statutory entitlements and contract norms in more depth, and the same approach to contractor engagement applies where a role is genuinely independent rather than employment. Working-hours reform is not unique to Spain either; comparing how neighbouring markets handle it, such as Romania’s working-hours rules, is a useful reference when you operate across several European jurisdictions.