No Time Records? How Workers Prove Hours the Employer Never Kept

Employers who keep no records think they are safe. California law flips it: your reasonable reconstruction becomes the evidence, and the employer must disprove it.

What California Law Says

Recordkeeping is the employer’s legal duty. Under the Anderson v. Mt. Clemens framework applied in California, a worker’s just and reasonable estimate of unrecorded hours shifts the burden to the employer to produce contrary evidence — and doubts resolve against the party that broke the records duty.

How to Fight Back, Step by Step

1. Build a representative week: start times, end times, breaks, anchored to fixed events you remember.
2. Corroborate with independent traces: transit records, phone location history, texts, alarm codes, receipts.
3. Extend the representative pattern across the claim period with seasonal adjustments.
4. Present it as a clean day-by-day worksheet — the kit includes the DLSE-style layout.
5. File; incomplete employer records at the hearing work in your favor, not theirs.

Common Questions

My estimate might be off by a bit. Will that sink the claim?

No — precision is not required where the employer failed its recordkeeping duty; reasonableness is the standard.

The employer will just produce fake records. Then what?

Fabricated records crumble against your independent traces, and demonstrated falsification devastates employer credibility on every issue in the case.