Is time tracking mandatory in Switzerland?
Yes. Article 46 ArG obliges every employer to keep records containing the information needed to enforce the law. Article 73 ArGV 1 specifies that information, including the hours worked. The duty applies regardless of company size, so it covers small businesses with only a few employees too. It also applies to part-time staff, to people working from home and to models such as flexitime or annualised hours. Compliance is checked by the cantonal labour inspectorate.
Who is exempt from recording working time
The duty applies to every employee covered by the Labour Act. Only certain businesses and groups are exempt, including:
- Senior executives with real decision-making power over important matters of the business (Art. 3 lit. d ArG). A management title alone is not enough.
- People doing scientific work or independent artistic work (Art. 3 lit. d ArG).
- Federal, cantonal and municipal administrations, agricultural businesses and private households (Art. 2 ArG), some of which follow their own rules.
- Family businesses in which only the owner's spouse and close relatives work (Art. 4 ArG).
- Self-employed people and freelancers, because they are not employees. Tracking time still pays off for them, for example for invoicing.
What a complete time record must contain
For systematic recording under Article 73 ArGV 1, records must be complete enough for an inspector to verify compliance. In practice they need to show the following:
- Personal details of each employee, the type of work, and the dates of joining and leaving.
- The start and end of each working period, and of breaks of 30 minutes or more.
- The daily and weekly hours worked, including overtime and compensatory work.
- The days of rest granted and any compensatory rest days.
- Wage or time supplements owed by law, for example for night or Sunday work.
Three models: full, simplified or waived
The law knows three forms. The default is full, systematic recording under Article 73 ArGV 1. Employees who decide a significant part of their own working hours may agree to simplified recording, where only the daily hours are recorded (Art. 73b ArGV 1). A complete waiver, often called trust-based working time, is only allowed under strict conditions, including a collective labour agreement and an annual income above CHF 120,000 (Art. 73a ArGV 1). We explain the details in our guide to trust-based working time.
Retention period: 5 years
Under Article 73 paragraph 2 ArGV 1, working-time records must be kept for at least five years after they cease to be valid. The cantonal labour inspectorate can ask to see them during an inspection, so the data must stay complete, readable and easy to find for the whole period, even long after an employee has left.
Maximum hours, statutory overtime and contractual overtime
Time records mainly exist to prove that the limits of the Labour Act are respected. Swiss law distinguishes two kinds of overtime that are often confused:
- Maximum weekly working time is 45 hours for employees in industrial companies, office staff, technical and other salaried staff, and sales staff in large retail businesses. A maximum of 50 hours applies to everyone else (Art. 9 ArG).
- Contractual overtime (Überstunden) is time worked beyond the hours in the employment contract, up to the legal maximum. It is governed by the Code of Obligations (Art. 321c OR) and is compensated with time off or paid with a 25 percent supplement, unless agreed otherwise in writing.
- Statutory overtime (Überzeit) is work beyond the legal maximum. It is limited to 2 hours per day and to 170 hours per year for a 45-hour maximum, or 140 hours per year for a 50-hour maximum (Art. 12 ArG).
- For statutory overtime the employer owes a wage supplement of at least 25 percent, unless it is compensated with time off with the employee's consent. For office, technical and other salaried staff, the supplement only applies beyond 60 hours of statutory overtime per calendar year (Art. 13 ArG).
Breaks, rest periods, night and Sunday work
Breaks and rest periods can also only be proven with clean time records. The key rules are:
- Breaks are mandatory: at least 15 minutes for more than 5.5 hours of work, 30 minutes for more than 7 hours and 1 hour for more than 9 hours (Art. 15 ArG).
- If employees may not leave their workplace during a break, the break counts as working time.
- Daily rest must be at least 11 consecutive hours (Art. 15a ArG).
- Day and evening work falls between 6 am and 11 pm. Night work between 11 pm and 6 am and Sunday work are prohibited in principle and require a permit (Art. 10, 16 ff. and 18 ff. ArG).
Can the employer correct time records?
Mistakes happen, such as a forgotten clock-out. Obvious errors may be corrected, but this should be done transparently: with a reason, logged in a traceable way and ideally confirmed by the employee concerned. If hours are cut after the fact to make overtime disappear, the records are no longer accurate, which is exactly what the recording duty is meant to prevent. Employees should therefore be able to see their recorded hours at any time.
Annualised hours, flexitime and working from home
Flexible models are allowed, but they do not remove the duty to record time. With annualised hours and flexitime, working time is recorded just as with fixed hours; only the balancing happens over a longer period. Maximum hours, breaks and rest periods still apply. Working time must also be recorded when working from home, most easily digitally on a phone or in the browser.
What happens without time records
The cantonal labour inspectorate can carry out inspections and require a business to supply missing or incomplete records. Anyone who breaches the rules on working and rest time can be penalised under the Labour Act (Art. 59 ff. ArG), and without time records it is hard to prove those rules were followed. In a dispute about overtime, missing records can also count against the employer, because courts may then make it easier for employees to prove their claims.
Paper, Excel or an app?
The law does not prescribe a specific format. Paper timesheets and Excel lists are allowed as long as they are complete and allow an inspection. In practice, though, they are error-prone: hours are filled in from memory, breaks are missing, and balances have to be calculated by hand. Digital time tracking such as Zytbox records start, end and breaks as people clock in and out, calculates balances automatically and keeps the data organised.
How Zytbox helps you stay compliant
Zytbox is built around these Swiss rules, so compliance is the default rather than extra work.
- It records the start, end and breaks of each working day and totals the daily and weekly hours automatically.
- It supports both full and simplified recording, so you can choose the model for each team.
- It stores your data for the legal retention period and keeps it ready for an inspection.
- It flags statutory overtime and rest-period issues early, before they become violations.
- Every change to a time entry is logged.
This is not legal advice
This guide gives a plain-language overview and does not replace individual legal advice. For binding details, refer to the official texts of the Labour Act (ArG) and Ordinance 1 (ArGV 1), or contact your cantonal labour inspectorate or the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO).