How to keep working time records on site, with mobile crews and subcontractors: the art. 119 duty, pay premiums, ITM risks and GPS clock-in on project zones.
Translated from Romanian. This article covers Romanian labour and tax law; the Romanian version is canonical and is updated first.
A worker on one site in the morning and another in the afternoon, a subcontractor’s crew joining for two weeks, a foreman with no signal on the eighth floor of a building under construction — time tracking in construction comes with constraints an ordinary office never meets. The law, on the other hand, makes no exception: the duty to keep records stays the same.
Article 119 of the Labour Code (Codul Muncii) requires every employer to keep a record of the hours worked each day by each employee, with the start and the end time of the schedule, and to make it available to labour inspectors on request. The law draws no distinction between an office employee and one working on an open site, far from the company’s premises.
The fact that the team is not in an office does not remove the duty — it only makes it harder to discharge with traditional methods. A paper register kept by a foreman who moves between work points is exactly the scenario in which the record becomes incomplete, or contradictory from one site to another.
A few features of the sector make time tracking harder than in most industries:
These features do not change the law, but they radically change which time-tracking method actually works in the field.
Whatever the industry, the general working time framework in the Labour Code applies on site as well: a normal schedule of, as a rule, 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week, a minimum daily rest of 12 consecutive hours between two working days (a minimum of 8 hours in shift work) and a weekly rest of, as a rule, 48 consecutive hours. Maximum working time, including overtime, cannot exceed 48 hours a week (art. 114), and it may be exceeded temporarily only if the average over a reference period of at most 4 months stays below that ceiling.
The risk specific to construction is that peaks of activity (concrete pours, handover deadlines, making up for delays caused by the weather) can repeatedly push towards the 48-hour threshold, and without records centralised per project nobody can see the real average over those 4 months — only the current week.
Overtime on a construction site is treated exactly as anywhere else. As a first option, overtime is compensated with paid time off granted within the following 90 calendar days (art. 122); only if the time off cannot be granted within that period is a premium of at least 75% of the basic salary paid for each overtime hour (art. 123). Work on a public holiday, if it is not compensated with time off, attracts a premium of at least 100% of the basic salary for the hours falling within the normal schedule of that day (art. 142) — and handover deadlines that “push” work into a public holiday are frequent in construction. Night work (22:00–06:00) means either a schedule shortened by one hour with no reduction in pay, or a premium of at least 25%.
On a site with shift crews or tight deadlines, these premiums can stack — an overtime hour worked at night, on a public holiday, attracts several increases at once. Without a precise record by day and by hour, these combinations are practically impossible to calculate by hand.
An inspection by the Labour Inspectorate (Inspecția Muncii) on a site checks, first of all, exactly what art. 119 says: is there a record of the hours worked by every person present at the work point, on that day? Typical risk situations: people with no clear record (particularly a subcontractor’s staff, if it is not clear who keeps records for whom), “informal” overtime generated by a pressing deadline but recorded nowhere, or a register kept at the office, far from the site, hard to reconcile with who is actually present on the day of the inspection.
The absence of the record required by art. 119 is sanctioned as an administrative offence; fine levels are updated periodically by law, so the exact amount must be checked at the official source on the date of the inspection. Beyond the fine, the lack of a correct record leaves the company without any evidence at all in a possible labour dispute about hours worked or the payment of premiums.
For time tracking that really holds up on site, what matters most is: GPS with a perimeter around the site area (a clock-in is only valid inside the perimeter of the work point), a date and time stamp at the real moment of the action (not filled in later “from memory”), tolerance to loss of signal (the app records locally and syncs when the connection returns) and aggregation by project, not only by person, so you can see who worked on which site, for how long, and what the labour costs on each project. These elements address exactly the features described above: mobility, distances, lack of signal and the mix of crews at the same work point.
Workly treats mobile time tracking as a core scenario, not an exception. The companion app allows clocking in with GPS tied to site zones configured per project: the clock-in or clock-out is validated against the real location, and hours are aggregated automatically for each work point — useful both for payroll and for the real labour cost per project.
For teams without a company smartphone, the kiosk with a rotating QR code and NFC card offers a quick alternative: a station mounted at the site entrance, where workers clock in by scanning or by simply tapping the card.
From the time record, the data flows deterministically onward into payroll — calculated under Romanian 2026 legislation, with an export in SAGA format, the basis on which your accountant files the D112 return — with no manual re-keying and no transcription errors between a field spreadsheet and the payroll register. The Industries section shows how Workly adapts to each type of operation, including construction.
For companies running several sites at once, the most visible gain is not only compliance but the administrative time recovered: nobody has to rebuild a centralised timesheet by hand at the end of the month from separate sheets brought in from each work point.
To calculate the premiums due for hours worked beyond schedule, you can use the 2026 overtime calculator.
Informational article, accurate at the date of publication. Not tax or legal advice. The rules and the level of fines may change; always check the text in force at the official source (legislatie.just.ro, the Labour Inspectorate) or consult a specialist before taking decisions.
Night work guide: the 22:00–06:00 window, the 3-hour test, the choice between a schedule shortened by one hour and the 25% premium, medical examinations and protected categories.
Shift planning guide: the 12-hour daily rest and the 48-hour weekly one, night shifts, uneven schedules, the 4-month reference period and the rules on communicating the roster.
Overtime calculation step by step: the hourly rate, the minimum 75% premium, compensation with time off within 90 days, combining with the night premium and public holidays.
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