Requirement for documenting working hours

According to the Minimum Wage Act all employers are obliged to document the beginning, end, and duration of the daily working time of low-income employees and to keep the records for at least two years.

This applies to all employees who earn up to the amount of the currently valid marginal earnings threshold or who are not employed for more than 3 months in a year. In most cases this includes

The regulations may also apply to other employees who only work few part-time hours. However, due to the product of pay grade, step, number of hours, and claims to annual bonuses it is not possible to determined beforehand whether the limit for minor employment is kept and the employee is subject to statutory documentation requirements. 

The Human Resources Department therefore advises to document working hours of any employee, seeing as it is already common custom.

Important questions on documentation requirements

The Human Resources Department has received a lot of questions on this topic:

There is no particular form of documentation required by law. Documentation in paper form is sufficient. It is sufficient to provide one documentation in paper form per person and per work day, which indicates the beginning, the end and the daily duration of work.

  • You may also use the form “Stundennachweis für eine Aushilfe” (time sheet for temporary staff) (forms on the right hand side) which you can download at the beginning of the month and fill in.
  • If you would like to document your work hours on your computer, you can use the Excel time sheet (forms on the right). This must be printed at the end of the month. The University keeps records on paper and not only electronically.
  • If temporary staff also has to work during the night, on Saturdays, or on Sundays, according to the collective agreement they are entitled to supplement payments. The special hourly times sheet for low-income employees automatically indicates time periods during which supplements will be paid.
    Hourly time sheet for low-income employees

Important: The employer is obliged to adhere to the documentation requirement and has to counter-sign the respective documents.

The retention requirement is the responsibility of the employer, and we ask that it is archived at a central office in a department or institute (e.g. in the Secretary's Office).

The controls are planned when the auditing of the correctness of the social security payments of the LBV by the German Pension Insurance Agency is conducted every four years. The LBV can demand the time sheets from us for cases that are audited. Whether there will be additional audits, perhaps directly at the University, is currently not known.

Then we as an employer are guilty of a misdemeanor that is punished with a fine of up to 30,000 euros.