Motivated by the study of area laws for the entanglement entropy of gapped ground states of quantum spin systems and their stability, we prove that the unitary cocycle generated by a local time-dependent Hamiltonian can be approximated, for any finite set X, by a tensor product of the corresponding unitaries in X and its complement, multiplied by a dynamics strictly supported in the neighbourhood of the surface ∂X. The error decays almost exponentially in the size of the neighbourhood and grows with the square of the area |∂X|^2.