Annual Paid Leave in Korea: Your Legally Guaranteed Recharge Days

After a full day on your phone, you have to plug it in overnight. Workers are the same. After working nonstop, you need rest time to refill your drained energy.

In Korea, annual paid leave is a legal right for employees at workplaces with 5 or more regular workers. If you show up for at least 80% of your first year, you earn 15 days of paid leave by default. Your pay stays the same, because the law treats those days off as normal workdays.

If you're a new hire with less than a year at the company, don't worry. In your first year, every month you work with perfect attendance earns you 1 day of leave the following month. That adds up to up to 11 days in the first year, and you can use them as they come.

The longer you stay at one company, the more recharge days you earn. You start at 15 days. After 3 years of continuous work, you get 1 extra day every 2 years. You reach 16 days in year 4 (after 3 full years) and 17 days in year 6 (after 5 full years). By law, the total tops out at 25 days.

To be more precise, the basic rule is that employees choose their own leave dates and request them freely. Your company can't just order you to take a particular day off. (There are exceptions, such as a written agreement with an employee representative.) The company can ask you to move your leave to another date only when your absence would seriously disrupt the business, like when so many people leave at once that a factory would have to shut down. This is called the right to change the timing of leave.

Part-timers and contract workers get annual leave too, as long as they work 15 hours or more per week. The number of days isn't the same, though. It's calculated in proportion to the hours you work. If you work 20 hours a week, you get roughly half the leave of a 40-hour-a-week employee.

Leave you earn after a year or more of work can be used for one year from the day you earn it. The monthly days you earn in your first year must be used by your first work anniversary. So what if work gets so busy that you can't use all your leave within the year? In that case, you get paid for the days you worked instead of resting. This is your right to be paid for unused leave. It's calculated based on your ordinary wage and deposited into your bank account.

But it isn't always automatic. Your employer may not have to pay you for unused days if it follows a legal process called the leave usage promotion system. First, the company notifies you in writing of your remaining days before the deadline and asks you to pick dates. If you don't, the company picks the dates itself and tells you in writing. If your employer completes every step and you still don't take the leave, it may be off the hook for the payout.

In the end, the law's real purpose is for you to take your rest on time and protect your health and energy, not to trade your leave for cash.