Korea Paid Annual Leave Calculator

Korean paid annual leave sits almost entirely inside one article of the Labor Standards Act, Article 60. What trips people up is not the article's headline rule but a 2017 amendment that changed how two of its clauses interact, and most informal explanations circulating in English still describe the pre-2017 version. This calculator applies the current one.

Two entitlements exist side by side today, independently of each other. Article 60(1) gives a worker 15 days of paid leave for a year in which they attended at least 80% of working days. Article 60(2) gives a worker with under one year of continuous service, or with under 80% attendance in a given year, one paid day for every full month of perfect attendance. That second track tops out at 11 days by the time a full year has passed, because the one-year mark switches the worker to the Article 60(1) rule instead of granting a twelfth accrual month.

Before 28 November 2017 a third clause sat between those two. The old Article 60(3) reduced the second year's 15-day entitlement by however many days the worker had already used under Article 60(2) during their first year, and the 2017 amendment deleted that offset. In practice, a worker who completes two years of full attendance is now entitled to up to 11 days accrued during year one plus a separate, un-reduced 15 days that vests the moment year one is complete: up to 26 days across the first two years, with no netting between them. This calculator reflects the law with the offset already gone, which has been the case for every hire date for years.

From the third year of continuous service, Article 60(4) adds a bonus day for every 2 years of service beyond the first, layered on the 15-day base, with a hard ceiling of 25 days. Years 1 and 2 both sit at 15. Years 3 and 4 both step up to 16, years 5 and 6 reach 17, and the pattern continues from there. The increase lands every other year rather than every year, and it stops at 25, which a worker reaches after 21 years of continuous service.

None of this turns on nationality. Article 6 of the same Act forbids discriminatory treatment of working conditions on grounds of nationality, faith or social status, so a worker on an E-7, E-9 or F-series visa accrues leave on exactly the same schedule as a Korean colleague at the same company. That comes as a surprise to workers arriving from the United States, where the Fair Labor Standards Act requires no payment for time not worked and vacation is purely a matter of agreement with the employer. In Korea the number on this page is a statutory floor: a contract can improve on it, but it cannot sign it away.

One Korean feature has no close equivalent in most English-speaking countries, and it decides whether unused days turn into cash. Article 61 lets an employer extinguish its obligation to pay for expired leave if it runs a written usage-promotion procedure. Within a 10-day window that opens 6 months before the leave period ends, the employer must tell each worker in writing how many days remain and ask them to schedule those days. If the worker does not respond within 10 days, the employer must itself set the dates in writing at least 2 months before the period ends. For workers still inside their first year the two deadlines are 3 months and 1 month instead. Skip the procedure and the unused days have to be paid out; run it properly and they simply lapse.

The 80% attendance condition in Article 60(1) is not something this calculator can verify, because only you know your actual attendance record for the year that just closed. That is why attendance is a selectable input rather than a built-in assumption. If your most recently completed service year fell below 80%, Article 60(2) governs that year instead of the 15-day table, and your entitlement reverts to monthly accrual capped at 11 days for that year specifically, even when your total tenure is well past 3 years.

Two separate thresholds can switch the whole article off. Article 18(3) excludes a worker averaging under 15 hours a week over a 4-week period from Article 60 entirely, the same 15-hour line that governs severance eligibility. Article 11(1) then applies the Act in full only to workplaces with 5 or more regular employees, and the Enforcement Decree schedule listing which provisions reach smaller workplaces leaves Article 60 out. At a workplace of 4 or fewer, statutory annual leave does not arise at all, and any leave you do get comes from your contract or the company rules. This calculator asks for your hours but not your employer's headcount, so check that number before relying on the result.

If the figure here and the one in your company HR system disagree, the input worth checking first is the hire date, since continuous service starts on the day employment actually began rather than the day your current contract was signed. Many Korean employers also grant leave on a fiscal-year cycle instead of each worker's own anniversary, which shifts the timing even when the annual totals eventually line up. Bring both numbers and your employment contract to HR. If that goes nowhere, annual-leave complaints are handled by the local branch office of the Ministry of Employment and Labor, whose counselling line is 1350 on weekdays from 09:00 to 18:00.