Regulation in PracticeTime registration is on its way. The most interesting question is what you do with it
Belgium is preparing a general obligation for working time registration. This could become a new layer of administration. Or it could finally make visible how work is actually organised.
Björn Slegers ·
Time registration evokes an image that remains remarkably persistent. The time clock. Arrive. Clock in. Leave. Clock out. Perhaps that explains why the discussion polarises so quickly. For some, registration is necessary to monitor working time and overtime. For others, it feels like a step back to presence as a measure of work.
But the change that is on the table today is more interesting than that contrast.
What Europe is actually asking
The European Court of Justice already ruled in 2019 that member states must require employers to provide an objective, reliable and accessible system with which the daily working time of employees can be measured. The European Working Time Directive itself does not, therefore, prescribe a Belgian time clock. The case law does state that rights regarding maximum working hours and minimum rest periods must be verifiable in practice.
Belgium does not yet have a general legal obligation for every employer and employee. Specific registration requirements do already exist, for example with flexitime schedules and in certain forms of part-time work. The federal government wants to change this and is aiming for general working time registration from 2027.
On 30 September 2026, the National Labour Council issued an opinion on the draft bill. This is important for the wording: at the time of publication, this is still legislation in preparation. The final Belgian rules may therefore still change. But here too, the most interesting question for organisations is not whether an extra mandatory field will soon be added to HR software.
The more interesting question is what becomes visible when time actually worked is captured more clearly.
An hour says surprisingly little
An employee who works ten hours on a Tuesday could be handling an exceptional deadline. Or hiding a structural capacity problem. A team with no overtime might be excellently organised. Or people simply are not registering their extra work. The time itself does not tell the story. The context does. When registered time is combined with scheduling, contractual hours, leave, absence, team staffing and payroll, the question shifts.
Not just: how many hours were worked? But also: where is structural pressure building up? Where is extra work gradually becoming normal? Where is leave going untaken? Which schedule only works because the same employees create capacity time and again? Those are different conversations.
Measuring is not the same as monitoring
Time registration is quickly pitted against trust. As if a modern organisation has to choose between autonomy and knowing what is happening. We find that dichotomy too simple. Trust does not mean that an organisation deliberately knows nothing. And measuring does not automatically mean that every deviation must be judged.
The difference lies mainly in what you do with the information. A system that collects minutes to hold employees to account for their presence will be experienced differently than a system that makes it visible that a team has been handling more work than it was designed for for months. The technology can be identical. The management logic cannot.
The obligation can therefore also become an opportunity
When the Belgian rules become final, organisations will naturally ask a practical question. What system do we need to comply? That is logical. But it would be a shame if the exercise ended there. When working time is registered more reliably anyway, the opportunity arises to make a part of the organisation visible that is often only discovered late in the day.
In payroll. In cases of long-term overload. In cases of absence. In cases of turnover. Or when a team finally signals that it can no longer cope. No time registration system can tell you why a pattern exists. But without reliable registration, sometimes we do not even know the pattern is there. So perhaps time registration is returning due to regulation.
That does not mean organisations have to design it like a time clock from the past. Anyone who connects time with the rest of the organisational context gets more than time administration.
They get a better picture of how work actually happens.
Time in Almuruna One