Is the individual counting of working hours using a tool that pre-records employees’ daily working hours an objective, reliable and accessible system?

Conseil d’État, 1st – 4th joint chambers, April 17, 2025, n°492418

The Conseil d’Etat validates the tool set up by an employer to individually count the working time of its employees, operating in two stages: daily working time pre-entered by the tool at the start of the week, but corrected by employees at the end of the week.

An employer, who was required by law to keep individual daily and weekly records of his employees’ working hours, had set up a two-stage system for recording working hours:

• Firstly, at the beginning of each week, the tool was set up to indicate the theoretical daily working hours that would be worked by each employee during the week, in application of the company’s collective agreement on working hours;
• Secondly, at the end of each working week, employees were required to rectify this declaration by entering the hours actually worked during each working day.

The Labour Inspection, considering that this system did not meet the criteria of objectivity, reliability and accessibility imposed by the Conseil d’Etat in this field, imposed an administrative fine on the employer, who challenged it before the administrative judge.

However, the Conseil d’Etat ruled against the Labour Inspection:

• First, it reminds us that:
  • In accordance with Articles L. 3171-2 and D. 3171-8 of the French Labor Code, when employees in a workshop, department or team do not work to the same collective work schedule, the employer must count the working hours of each of these employees:
    • Daily: either by recording the start and end times of each work period, or by noting the number of hours worked during the day;
    • Weekly: by summarizing the number of hours worked by each employee during the week.
  • In accordance with a Conseil d’Etat ruling of October 6, 2023, this individual counting of working hours must be carried out using an objective, reliable and accessible system.

• In the light of this case law and these texts, the Conseil d’Etat confirmed that:
  • An employer may use a computerized system which automatically declares the theoretical working hours for each employee…
  • … but in this case, the system must guarantee that any mismatches between the anticipated number of hours and the number of hours actually worked will be corrected for each day and each week worked.

• The Conseil d’Etat also adds that:
  • The short timeframe within which this correction must be made is part of the objective, reliable and accessible nature of the system implemented;
  • The fact that the system displays an incorrect number of hours during the time interval available to employees to make their corrections cannot lead to the consideration that this system does not offer the required guarantees of objectivity, reliability and accessibility.
  • Implicitly, moreover, it is understood that giving employees until the end of the week to correct the advance declaration is sufficiently brief for this tool to be objective, reliable and accessible.

This decision validates the practice of many companies in this area; however, care must be taken to ensure that employees are able to adjust their declarations to take account of their actual working hours.