K-magpie › Kmagpie Tools › Weekly Holiday Allowance Calculator
Weekly Holiday Allowance Calculator
Korea has a paid day off that most countries do not: the weekly holiday allowance (주휴수당). Work 15 hours or more a week and show up for every shift, and your employer owes you one extra paid day on top of the hours you actually worked. Enter your hours below to see what you should be getting, based on the 2026 minimum wage of 10,320 won.
Leave days off at 0. Enter only the hours you actually work, not unpaid breaks such as meal times.
The total hours you are scheduled to work in a week. Do not count unpaid breaks.
You only get the allowance if you work all of your scheduled days that week. Miss even one and you lose it for that week. Arriving late or leaving early does not count as an absence.
Weekly holiday allowance (per week)
See the full calculation
What the weekly holiday allowance is
Article 55 of the Labor Standards Act (근로기준법) requires employers to give workers at least one paid day off per week on average. Paid, meaning you are not working that day but you still get paid for it. That one day of pay is the weekly holiday allowance (주휴수당). Because it is money for hours you did not work, plenty of people never realize it exists.
If you are on a monthly salary, it is usually baked into that salary already. The problem is hourly work. Many places still pay nothing but your hourly rate times the hours on the schedule, and if you meet the requirements, the weekly holiday allowance is owed on top of that.
Who qualifies
You need to meet both conditions.
First, your contracted hours must average 15 hours or more per week over four weeks. Article 18(3) of the Labor Standards Act says the weekly paid-holiday rule does not apply to very short-hours workers below that line. At 14 hours a week you get nothing; at 15 hours you get it. That one-hour gap matters enough that some employers deliberately schedule people at 14 hours.
Second, you must work every scheduled day in that week. Skip one and you lose the allowance for that week. Showing up late or leaving early, though, still counts as full attendance.
Here is the part that surprises people: workplaces with fewer than five employees have to pay it too. Annual leave and overtime premiums do not apply to workplaces that small, but the weekly holiday allowance does. Convenience stores, cafés and small restaurants are all covered.
How much you get
If you work 40 hours or more a week, it is eight hours of pay. Working beyond 40 hours does not increase it; eight hours is the ceiling.
Below 40 hours a week, it shrinks in proportion to what you work.
Weekly holiday allowance = (weekly contracted hours ÷ 40) × 8 × hourly wage
So if you work 20 hours a week at 10,320 won an hour, that is (20 ÷ 40) × 8 × 10,320 = 41,280 won, or four hours of pay. Over a month it comes to roughly 180,000 won, which is not small money.
The 2026 minimum wage and this allowance
The 2026 minimum wage (최저임금) is 10,320 won an hour, up 290 won (2.9%) from 10,030 won in 2025. The official monthly figure is 2,156,880 won, and that is based on 209 hours.
The weekly holiday allowance is already inside that 209-hour number. Take 40 contracted hours a week, add the 8 holiday hours to get 48, multiply by 4.345 average weeks in a month, and you get 208.6 hours, rounded up to 209. In other words, the 2,156,880 won monthly minimum already includes the weekly holiday allowance. That is why salaried workers cannot claim it separately.
Hourly work is the opposite: the wage and the allowance are calculated separately. If your hourly rate matches the minimum wage but you are not receiving the weekly holiday allowance, that is a minimum wage violation.
If you are a foreign worker in Korea
The rules here are about work, not nationality. Part-time jobs at cafés, convenience stores, restaurants and hagwons are covered whether you hold an E-2, F-series, D-2 or any other status, and an employer cannot decide the allowance does not apply to you because you are not Korean. One caution: working outside the terms of your visa, such as a D-2 student working without a part-time work permit, is a separate immigration problem that can affect your status. It does not erase what you are owed for hours already worked, but the two issues run on different tracks, so get advice on both before you act.
The quickest way to spot underpayment is to divide your total pay for a period by the total hours you worked in it. If the answer lands right at the minimum wage, or barely above it, and you were working 15 or more hours a week, the weekly holiday allowance is probably missing. Done properly, a 20-hour week should work out to roughly ten percent more than your hourly rate times your hours.
If the numbers look wrong, start by building your own record: photos of the schedule, your shift times, bank transfer records. Then ask for a written pay statement (임금명세서), which employers are legally required to provide and which has to show how each amount was worked out. If that does not resolve it, call the Ministry of Employment and Labor counselling line at 1350 (dial it without an area code; interpretation is available in several languages) or file a complaint with your regional labor office, in person or online. Unpaid wage claims have a three-year limitation period, so old shifts do eventually fall out of reach. This is general information rather than legal advice, and your own contract and schedule can change the picture, so treat the counselling line as the place to confirm your specific case.
Problems people run into
My boss says there is no such thing
If you meet the requirements and are not paid, that is unpaid wages, and you can file a complaint with the Ministry of Employment and Labor. Call 1350 without an area code for counselling, or apply online through the ministry's website. Gather your employment contract, your bank records showing what was actually paid, and your work schedule before you start.
My boss says the allowance is already in my hourly rate
This is called an inclusive wage arrangement, and for it to hold up, the employment contract has to state clearly how much of the rate is the weekly holiday allowance, and the rate that remains after backing it out must still meet the minimum wage. For example, "12,000 won per hour (weekly holiday allowance included)" works out to a real hourly rate of 12,000 ÷ 1.2 = 10,000 won, which falls short of the 2026 minimum of 10,320 won. Read your contract carefully.
My hours change from week to week
What counts is the hours set in your employment contract. If your actual shifts jump around, eligibility is judged on a four-week average. For this calculator, enter the hours you normally work.
I work five days a week, three hours a day
That is exactly 15 hours a week, so you just clear the bar. The allowance is (15 ÷ 40) × 8 × your hourly wage, or three hours of pay. Cut one day and you drop to 12 hours a week and get nothing at all, so think twice before agreeing to a reduced schedule.
Related tools
Try the Magpie TestsYour birth date is the only input and it takes 30 seconds — zombie survival rate, past life, idol position, guardian spirit. Made to compare with friends.
→