Summary
Time tracking for remote employees is now the norm rather than the exception: 78 percent of companies with remote workers use time tracking software (Digital.com, 2025), and in the EU every employer has been legally required to record daily working time since the Court of Justice ruling in 2019. The hard part is not the software. It is choosing a method that matches the kind of work, measuring the things that matter for pay and workload rather than for suspicion, and telling people exactly what is recorded. This guide covers the legal baseline in the US and EU, the three tracking methods and who each suits, the six numbers worth looking at, a rollout plan, and the mistakes that turn a reasonable system into a surveillance complaint.
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Why Remote Teams Track Time at All
When everyone sat in one office, time was tracked by presence. The badge, the chair and the manager's eyes did the job. Remote work removed all three, and organisations replaced them in one of two ways: with trust and outcomes, or with software. Most ended up with a mix, and the data shows the mix tilting toward software. Resume Builder's 2025 survey found roughly 60 percent of large employers use some form of monitoring for remote staff, and Owl Labs reports that 73 percent of employees say they would accept monitoring in exchange for the flexibility to work from home.
Four reasons recur when organisations explain why they track remote time, and each points to a different design.
- Pay accuracy: hourly and overtime-eligible staff must be paid for every hour worked, wherever they work
- Client billing: agencies and professional services firms invoice by the hour and need defensible records
- Workload visibility: managers cannot see the person who is quietly working sixty-hour weeks
- Legal compliance: EU employers must record daily working time; US employers must keep accurate hours for non-exempt staff
Only one of those four is about checking whether people are working. If that is your main reason, the problem is usually trust or output measurement, and a timer will not fix it. The monitoring versus micromanagement guide covers that distinction.
What the Law Actually Requires
The legal duty to record time does not change because someone works from their kitchen. It gets harder to meet.
United States. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to keep accurate records of hours worked by non-exempt employees, and to pay for all of it, including work the employer "suffers or permits" outside scheduled hours. For remote staff that means the 9pm email reply counts. Courts have repeatedly found against employers who auto-deducted lunch breaks or relied on scheduled hours instead of actual hours. Exempt salaried employees have no federal recording requirement, but many states add their own rules, and California adds meal and rest break premiums on top.
European Union. In May 2019 the Court of Justice of the EU ruled in the CCOO v Deutsche Bank case that every employer must operate an "objective, reliable and accessible" system that records the time worked each day by each worker. Recording only overtime is not enough. Member states have implemented this at different speeds, with Spain and Germany moving to explicit daily recording duties, but the principle applies across the bloc and remote work is no exemption. The legal guide covers the country-level detail.
United Kingdom. The Working Time Regulations require "adequate" records showing the 48-hour weekly limit is respected. Adequate has been read loosely, but the ICO expects any monitoring that supports it to be proportionate and disclosed.
The practical upshot: a remote time tracking system is a compliance tool first. Design it so it would survive a wage claim, and most of the other decisions fall into place.
Three Methods and Who Each Suits
There are only three ways to record time, and most tools are a variation on one of them.
| Method | How it works | Best for | Weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manual timesheets | Employee enters hours per day or project | Salaried knowledge work, small teams, low billing complexity | Filled in from memory; accuracy decays within days |
| Start and stop timers | Employee clocks in and out, optionally per task | Hourly staff, agencies billing by project, support shifts | Forgotten timers; disputes over gaps |
| Automatic capture | Software records active time on the work device during work hours | Hourly remote staff, regulated industries, teams with chronic over-hours | Needs a clear policy and employee self-view to be accepted |
The method should follow the reason. If the goal is pay accuracy for non-exempt remote staff, automatic capture or timers are the only defensible options, because a memory-based timesheet will not survive a wage claim. If the goal is workload visibility for salaried staff, a lightweight timesheet or automatic capture at the aggregate level is enough. If the goal is billing, task-level timers or automatic capture with project tagging are standard.
Whichever you pick, the time tracking policy has to say which method applies to which role and why. A system that treats salaried engineers and hourly support agents identically will be resented by both.
The Six Numbers Worth Looking At
Time tracking produces more data than anyone needs. Six figures carry almost all of the value, and none of them is a per-person productivity score.
1. Hours worked against hours scheduled
The compliance number. Any non-exempt employee consistently above schedule is accruing overtime whether or not it was approved. The unauthorised overtime guide covers what to do when the gap appears.
2. After-hours activity
Work recorded outside scheduled hours is a workload signal, a burnout precursor and, in the EU, a right-to-disconnect issue. Rising after-hours time on one team usually means the team is understaffed, not that it is committed.
3. Break compliance
Whether meal and rest breaks are being taken. Remote staff skip breaks more than office staff because nobody walks past and says lunch. In states with break premiums this is money; everywhere it is a wellbeing signal.
4. Billable share
For client-facing teams, the share of recorded time that can be invoiced. The utilisation rate guide explains the benchmarks.
5. Time by project or client
Where the team's hours actually go, compared with where the plan said they would. This is the number that improves estimates and exposes the client that is quietly unprofitable.
6. Start-time and end-time spread
How much variation there is in when people begin and finish. Flexible teams should expect a wide spread, and that is fine. A spread that widens suddenly for one person is a conversation, not a conclusion.
What is deliberately missing from the list: idle percentages, activity scores and keystroke counts. They measure motion, not work, and they are the figures most likely to be gamed. Automatic time tracking in E-Monitor reports the six above without a productivity ranking.
A Rollout That Remote Teams Accept
Owl Labs found that 53 percent of employees are comfortable with even screenshot monitoring if they are told in advance. The condition is the whole story. Remote time tracking is accepted when it is explained before it starts, and resented when it is discovered.
Week one: decide and write. Pick the method per role, list exactly what is recorded and what is not, decide who sees individual data and who sees only team totals, and write it into the policy. The policy template has the sections.
Week two: announce with a demo. Show the employee's own dashboard on a call. Seeing that they can view their own hours, correct a missed timer and see nothing their manager cannot explain removes most objections in ten minutes. The announcement templates include the remote-team version.
Weeks three to six: pilot with one team. Run it where the manager volunteered. Fix the app classifications that are wrong, the projects that nobody tags, and the question the policy forgot. Measure the program itself: how many people opened their own dashboard, how many disputes came in and how fast they were resolved.
Week seven onward: expand and review. Team by team, with a quarterly review of whether the data is still serving the stated purpose. The remote team monitoring guide covers the ongoing management side.
Mistakes That Turn Tracking Into Surveillance
The same tool can be a fair timekeeping system or a surveillance complaint depending on five decisions.
- Tracking outside work hours or on personal devices. Work hours only, work devices only, is the single setting that removes most objections
- Hiding the data from the people it describes. Employees who can see their own records trust the system and catch errors before payroll does
- Using single-day figures. One slow Tuesday is a life. Patterns over weeks are the only thing worth raising
- Ranking people by activity. Activity is not output. Ranking by it rewards the person with the mouse jiggler
- Letting the policy drift. A feature switched on by IT that the policy never mentioned is the fastest route to a grievance
The trust guide goes deeper on why disclosure changes how the same data lands.
Remote Time Tracking for Hourly vs Salaried Staff
The two groups need different systems and it is worth saying so plainly in the policy.
For hourly and non-exempt staff, precision matters because every recorded minute is pay. Automatic capture or clock-in timers, break tracking, overtime alerts before the threshold is crossed, and a dispute route that resolves within the pay period. Employees in this group generally prefer automatic capture once they have used it, because it stops them losing pay to a forgotten timer.
For salaried and exempt staff, precision matters less than pattern. Weekly totals, after-hours trend and project split are enough. Per-minute capture on a senior engineer produces resentment and nothing useful. Many organisations track this group at team level only, with individual detail available on request for a stated reason.
Contractors are a third case: time records are usually a contractual deliverable rather than an employer duty, and the contractor guide explains why the monitoring rules differ.
Choosing the Software
Five questions sort the market quickly. Does it capture time automatically, or only when someone remembers to start a timer? Does every employee get a self-view dashboard? Can it be limited to work hours and work devices by policy rather than by trust? Does it produce the six numbers above without inventing a productivity score? And does it export records in a form that would satisfy a wage audit?
The time tracking software comparison rates the main tools on those questions. E-Monitor answers yes to all five, with attendance tracking and project time in the same dashboard the employee sees.
Related reading: How to Run a Time Audit.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Is it legal to track remote employees' time?
Yes, and in many cases it is required. US employers must keep accurate hours for non-exempt staff under the FLSA. EU employers must record daily working time for every worker following the 2019 Court of Justice ruling. The limits are on how: disclose it, keep it proportionate, and stay within work hours on work devices.
2. What is the best way to track time for remote employees?
Match the method to the reason. Automatic capture on work devices during work hours for hourly staff and billing accuracy; lightweight timesheets or team-level totals for salaried knowledge workers. Whatever the method, employees should be able to see their own records.
3. Do remote employees have to clock in and out?
Only if the employer's policy requires it, which is common for hourly roles. Many remote teams replace clock-in with automatic time capture so that nobody loses pay to a forgotten timer. Salaried staff are often not required to clock in at all.
4. Can my employer track my hours on my personal computer?
Employers can only install tracking software on devices they own or that you have explicitly agreed to enrol. On a personal device without that agreement, the usual approach is a timesheet or a web-based timer rather than monitoring software.
5. How do I track remote employees' time without micromanaging?
Record time, not activity: hours, after-hours trend, breaks, project split. Skip idle percentages and activity rankings. Look at patterns over weeks rather than days, give everyone their own dashboard, and write down what is collected before switching anything on.
6. What should a remote time tracking policy include?
Which method applies to which roles, what is recorded and what is excluded, work-hours-only and work-device-only rules, who can see individual data, how long records are kept, how to dispute a record, and how the policy is reviewed.
Time tracking remote teams accept E-Monitor records hours automatically on work devices during work hours and shows every employee their own data, so pay is accurate and nobody is watched. Sign up →