What is the Maximum Work Hours per Week in Korea?

I wrote a post on the same topic four years ago and things stayed the same since then. However, the National Assembly passed an amendment to the Labor Standards Act on February 28, 2018 and several changes have been introduced to statutory work hours.

This new post is an update to the old post to reflect the amendment.

A. Maximum work hours per week

What is the maximum weekly work hours including overtime that you can implement in your workplace in Korea? The answer is 52 hours per week.

Now, here is an explanation on how we get 52 hours.

Statutory weekly work hours based on the Labor Standards Act(LSA) are 40 hours.

Article 50 of the LSA – (1) Working hours per week shall not exceed forty hours excluding recess hours.

The maximum overtime hours allowed by the law is 12 hours per week.

Article 53 of the LSA – (1) If the parties concerned reach agreement, the working hours stipulated in Article 50 may be extended up to twelve hours per week.

The LSA before the recent amendment lacked a definition of a week. There was no explict text showing if a week is five days or seven days.

This led to a guideline by the Ministry of Employment and Labor that excluded Saturday and Sunday from a week in the article 50 and thus enabled businesses to make employees work up to 68 hours during seven days based on the following formula.

40 hours during weekdays + 12-hour overtime + 8-hour for Satruday + 8-hour for Sunday = 68 hours.

Now the amendment introduced new article that defines one week as 7 days.

Based on the new defintion of one week as seven days, we have a new formula for the maximum work hours per week.

40 hours per week + 12-hour overtime = 52 hours per week (7 days)

B. Schedule for the maximum 52 work hour system

According to the LSA amendment, the maximum 52 hours will apply gradually to businesses with different sizes. The schedule is as follows.

• Workplaces with 300 or more employees: the 52 hours overtime cap applies to them from July 1, 2018
• Workplaces with 50 to 299 employees: the cap takes effect from January 1st, 2020
• Workplaces with 5 to 49 employees: the cap takes effect from July 1st, 2021

C. Special overtime temporarily allowed for small companies

Companies with less than 30 employees can have additional 8 hours’ overtime based on labor-management agreement, which means they can have 60 hours of work per week instead of 52 hours.

This exception is temporarily allowed to the small companies only from July 1st, 2021 to December 31st, 2022.

To introduce this special overtime, an employer should have a written agreement with an employee representative about the followings.

• Reasons for such extended overtime and the duration of such extension
• Scope of employees covered by the agreement