Korea Weekly Holiday Pay Calculator

Korea's weekly holiday pay allowance, commonly called juhyu-sudang, exists because Article 55(1) of the Labor Standards Act requires every employer to guarantee workers at least one paid day of rest per week on average. It is not a bonus or a discretionary perk. An eligible worker earns it automatically for any week in which the statutory conditions are met, and it is paid on top of the hours actually worked rather than instead of them.

Two conditions gate the entitlement. Article 18(3) excludes anyone averaging under 15 hours a week over a 4-week period from Article 55 entirely, and Enforcement Decree Article 30(1) requires perfect attendance on the scheduled working days of that week. The 15-hour line has produced a well-known workaround: employers scheduling shifts just under 15 hours a week, or splitting one worker across two nominally separate contracts or business registrations, specifically to stay under the threshold. The averaging rule matters here, because the test is a 4-week average rather than a single week in isolation, so one occasional short week does not by itself disqualify a worker whose contracted hours normally clear 15. Labor authorities have also treated split-contract arrangements as a single employment relationship where the facts show one continuous job under one effective employer.

Perfect attendance is the condition most often misunderstood. Article 30 asks whether you attended every scheduled working day that week, not whether you were on time or stayed until closing on each of them. Being late or leaving early on a scheduled day still counts as attending that day, since you were present and worked part of it. That is a matter for wage deduction or discipline, not for erasing the day's attendance. What actually breaks perfect attendance is not showing up at all on a day you were scheduled to work, without an approved absence. Leave that the law itself treats as attendance, most notably statutory annual leave, does not break it either.

The calculation follows Article 50(1) and (2), which fix the statutory reference at 40 hours a week and 8 hours a day. Below 40 weekly contracted hours the allowance is prorated: divide your weekly contracted hours by 40, multiply by 8, then by your hourly wage. At 40 hours or more the allowance is a flat 8 hours of pay at your hourly wage. Working more than 40 contracted hours does not increase it, because the allowance is anchored to the statutory reference schedule of a standard full-time worker rather than to your actual overtime.

This is also why Korean monthly salaries are quoted against 209 hours rather than the roughly 174 hours a month that 40 working hours a week would suggest. The standard month adds the 8 weekly holiday hours to the 40 worked hours and multiplies the 48 by the average 4.345 weeks in a month, which lands just over 208.5 and is rounded to 209. The Ministry of Employment and Labor uses exactly that basis when it publishes the monthly equivalent of the minimum wage: the 2026 hourly minimum of KRW 10,320 is announced alongside a monthly figure of KRW 2,156,880 for a 40-hour week. If you divide a Korean monthly salary by 174 to recover an hourly rate, you will overstate it by about 20 percent.

The 209-hour convention has a direct consequence for minimum wage compliance. An employer who pays exactly the statutory minimum hourly wage for hours worked, without separately paying the weekly holiday allowance, is paying below the legal floor once the allowance is accounted for. The allowance is a separate mandatory payment, not something already folded into a bare hourly rate. This calculator's effective hourly wage line divides your total weekly pay, allowance included, by your contracted hours, and that is the number worth comparing against the minimum wage in force.

One threshold that trips up foreign workers in small businesses cuts the other way from what most people assume. Table 1 of the Enforcement Decree, which lists the provisions that reach workplaces with 4 or fewer regular employees, includes Article 55(1). Weekly holiday pay is therefore owed at a small restaurant or convenience store just as it is at a large company, even though the same table leaves out Article 56, so overtime and night-work premiums do not apply there, and leaves out Article 60, so statutory annual leave does not arise. Nationality makes no difference to any of this: Article 6 forbids discriminatory treatment of working conditions on grounds of nationality.

The practical use of this page is checking a payslip. Find the total paid for the week, subtract the hours actually worked at your hourly rate, and see whether what remains matches the allowance shown here. If your payslip shows a single lump sum with no breakdown, ask for one, because Korean employers are required to give a wage statement itemising the calculation. A gap that persists after that conversation is an unpaid-wages issue for the local branch office of the Ministry of Employment and Labor.