Víctor María González Muñoz, director of the Labor Area of Afianza Legal, maintains that the new rule does not create new rights, but requires the documenting in writing of those that the workers already had, and that their greatest impact will be noted in the variable remuneration and in the SMEs.
- Late transposition and immediate application: the Council of Ministers adopted on 8 September 2026 the royal decree incorporating the European directive, four years after the deadline of 1 August 2022, and with an open sanctioning file.
- The duty of information is reinforced by: the new text replaces the royal decree of 1998 and makes the generic reference to the convention no longer serve as a substitute for a written explanation.
- Pyme supports the highest weight: the contracts in force must be completed by 30 days if the worker so requests, a demanding period for less structured enterprises.
From internal policy to contract: what was already a right, in writing
According to González Muñoz, «the rule does not create new rights, it forces to write those that already existed». A worker has always had the right to know how much he charges and for what concepts, what day he has and how it is distributed, and what will be required during the trial period. However, much of that information was not in the contract, but in an internal policy, in a mail, in a spreadsheet of the commercial department or in the memory of someone of the organization.
Contracts entered into after the publication of the royal decree must comply with it from the first day, without a period of adaptation.
The variable remuneration, the grey zone that changes the most
The director of the Afianza Legal Labor Area points to wages as the point where the change will be most demanding and where the legislator is most right. Bonuses, incentives and commissions are usually regulated in separate documents, with objectives that change each exercise and accrual criteria that allow very different interpretations when it comes to paying.
Therefore, explaining in writing the method of calculation and the objective criteria of accrual is not another bureaucratic burden. It is the only way that the worker can verify his payroll and, at the same time, the one that allows the company to defend it if the matter reaches a court. According to González Muñoz, most of the pay conflicts do not arise from a miscalculated figure, but from a rule that no one left written.
Trial day and period: predictability in the face of improvisation
Pre-fixing the criteria for the allocation of shifts, forewarns of change and minimum breaks may seem excessive for a company with stable schedules. However, in the sectors with turbulent and fixed discontinuums, this predictability distinguishes an orderly organization from another that improvises each week at the expense of its staff.
The same is true of the trial period: the obligation to specify what tasks and experiences are evaluated to distance it from its use as a wildcard to prolong a covert temporality.
A quick and documentation-focused transposition
The Afianza expert also identifies the shadows of the norm.
A royal decree that doesn't touch the bottom
The transposition is again made by royal decree, without passing through Congress and without modifying what only a law can change: the legal limits of the probation period, which remain those of the Workers' Statute, and the sanctioning regime. Again, it legislates on the obligation to document and not on the substance.
A calendar thought from an office
The weight of this documentation rests mainly on the small and medium-sized enterprise, which has the least structure to draft annexes, review models and meet the requests for information of its staff in thirty days. For González Muñoz, an almost immediate entry into force reflects a calendar thought from a firm and not from a company of twelve workers that closes the month with the right thing.
Ordering the contract is ordering the employment relationship
As the director of the Afianza Legal Labor Area concludes, the royal decree obliges to do now what well-managed companies already did out of conviction. An orderly relationship generates fewer conflicts, less rotation and fewer surprises on the payroll. The cost of adjusting is real and it is not appropriate to minimize it, but it is paid only once, while managing people with rules that nobody wrote is paid every month.
At Afianza we accompany companies in the review of contracts, pay annexes and internal policies to adapt them to the new duty of information, with the support of our teams employment counselling and Labour lawyershelping them reduce legal risks and payroll conflicts.
You can read the full article at:
- The Confidential: What the contract should always have said
