Korea's 2026 Minimum Wage: ₩10,320 an Hour, ₩2,156,880 a Month

₩10,320 an hour, and what that is a month

You have a payslip in front of you and no way to tell whether the number at the bottom is right. Two figures anchor everything else.

₩10,320 per hour, from 1 January to 31 December 2026. It was set by MOEL Notice No. 2025-47 (고용노동부고시 제2025-47호), dated 5 August 2025, and it applies to all industries.

The same notice publishes the official monthly equivalent: ₩2,156,880. That is 10,320 × 209.

Read ₩2,156,880 as a gross figure for a worker on 40 contracted hours a week. It is the number your pay is measured against before deductions — not the number that lands in your account.

2026 is ₩290 an hour above 2025, an increase of 2.9%. MOEL notes that the rate was agreed between labour and management — the first labour-management agreed rate in 17 years, since 2008.

Where 209 hours comes from

The monthly figure rests on 209 hours, and the notice defines the basis as 40 contracted hours a week and 209 monthly conversion hours, including 8 paid weekly-holiday hours a week.

Forty contracted hours a week, plus 8 paid weekly-holiday hours (주휴) — the paid rest day — makes 48 paid hours a week. Multiply by 4.345, the average number of weeks in a month, and you get 208.56, rounded to 209. The 2025 notice uses character-for-character identical wording.

Those 8 hours exist because Article 55(1) of the Labor Standards Act (근로기준법) requires at least one paid holiday a week on average. The entitlement is limited to workers whose contracted hours average 15 or more a week over 4 weeks under Article 18(3) and who worked all their scheduled days under Article 30(1) of the Enforcement Decree. It applies even in workplaces with 4 or fewer employees: attached Table 1 of the Enforcement Decree lists Article 55(1), though not Article 55(2).

So if your hourly rate is at or above ₩10,320 but your monthly pay sits well under ₩2,156,880, the first thing to check is whether you are being paid for the paid weekly-holiday hours at all.

It applies to you on the same terms

Item 2 of the 2026 notice says that the minimum wage applies identically to every workplace, with no distinction by industry or workplace size.

Article 3 of the Minimum Wage Act (최저임금법) applies the Act to every business employing workers. The only exclusions are businesses employing only cohabiting relatives, domestic workers (가사 사용인), and seafarers and shipowners under the Seafarers Act (선원법). There is no small-business exemption.

The Ministry of Government Legislation, Korea's official legal information service, states that an employer must pay an E-9 or H-2 worker at least the minimum wage and may not lower prior wage levels under Article 6(1) and (2) of the Minimum Wage Act. A contract term setting pay below the minimum wage is void and is automatically replaced by the minimum wage amount under Article 6(3). Signing such a contract does not make it binding.

Article 22 of the Act on the Employment of Foreign Workers (외국인고용법) separately prohibits an employer from treating a worker unfairly and discriminatorily on the ground that the worker is a foreign worker.

What counts toward the minimum wage, and what does not

Since 2024, monthly-paid bonuses and cash welfare allowances — meal allowance (식비), accommodation allowance (숙박비), transport allowance (교통비) — count 100% toward the minimum wage. The basis is Article 6(4) of the Minimum Wage Act together with Article 2 of the Addenda to Act No. 15666 of 12 June 2018, which phased the bonus exclusion and the cash welfare-allowance exclusion down to 0% from 2024.

Excluded from the calculation: night, holiday and overtime pay and their premiums; unused annual leave pay; and anything paid other than in cash under Article 6(4)3(a). A free dormitory or a free lunch does not count toward your minimum wage.

On housing and meals, the government's position is that an employer has no legal duty to provide them free to foreign workers and may charge a reasonable level.

Deducting that cost from your wages in advance requires your written consent (서면 동의). Without it, the cost has to be settled after the fact. Usage-billed utilities — heating and cooling, electricity, gas, internet — are in principle excluded from the accommodation charge and settled on actual cost afterwards.

How your employer has to pay you, and what the payslip must show

Article 43(1) of the Labor Standards Act: wages in currency, directly to the worker, in full. Article 43(2): at least once a month, on a fixed date.

The Ministry of Government Legislation lists the prohibited forms as promissory notes and cheques, gift vouchers, or the company's own products. Note the exception written into that list: a cashier's cheque with payment guaranteed by a bank (자기앞수표) is allowed. Violating Article 43 carries up to three years' imprisonment or a fine of up to ₩30,000,000 under Article 109(1).

Since 19 November 2021, Article 48(2) of the Labor Standards Act has required your employer to hand you an itemised payslip (임금명세서) every payday, on paper or in electronic form, showing each wage component, how variable components are calculated, and the amount of every deduction. Failure carries an administrative fine of up to ₩5,000,000 under Article 116(2)2. The duty holds in workplaces with 4 or fewer employees too, because attached Table 1 of the Enforcement Decree includes Articles 47 through 49 and the matching penalty provisions.

If you are not getting a payslip, start there. Nothing else in this article is checkable without one.

Overtime, night and holiday premiums

Article 50 of the Labor Standards Act caps working hours at 40 a week and 8 a day, excluding break time; Article 50(3) counts standby time (대기시간) spent under the employer's direction and supervision as working time. The maximum legal week is 52 hours — the 40 statutory hours plus up to 12 hours of extension by agreement between the parties under Article 53(1). That cap reached workplaces of 300 or more employees on 1 July 2018, 50 to 299 on 1 January 2020, and 5 to 49 on 1 July 2021.

The premiums are all measured against ordinary wage (통상임금). Article 56(1) and Article 56(3) are independent obligations, so overtime worked at night attracts both.

Two caveats decide whether any of this reaches you.

In workplaces with 4 or fewer regular employees, attached Table 1 of the Enforcement Decree to the Labor Standards Act lists from Chapter 4 only Article 54, Article 55(1) and Article 63. Articles 50, 53, 56 and 60 are absent — so the 40-hour week, the 52-hour cap, the premiums and annual paid leave do not legally apply there. The minimum wage and the payslip duty do survive at that size.

And Article 63 of the Labor Standards Act excludes agriculture and forestry, livestock, sericulture and fishery businesses from the working-hours, break and holiday provisions. In those sectors there is no statutory 52-hour cap and no overtime or holiday premium at any employer size. Two entitlements survive: the +50% night premium for 22:00–06:00 work, and annual paid leave under Article 60 — both only where the workplace has 5 or more regular employees.

What legally comes off your pay in 2026

Start with a correction that costs people money: an E-9 worker is not automatically enrolled in all four social insurances. The Ministry of Government Legislation lists them separately: mandatory National Health Insurance, mandatory industrial-accident insurance, National Pension subject to reciprocity, and mandatory employment insurance, with unemployment benefit and parental-leave and maternity-leave benefits applying only on separate application.

Pension is the one that varies by nationality. E-9 workers become workplace-based subscribers (사업장가입자) under the main clause of Article 126(1) of the National Pension Act (국민연금법), except under the reciprocity principle: where your home country's law does not apply an equivalent pension to Korean nationals, you are excluded from enrolment under the proviso to Article 126(1). If a colleague has a pension line on their payslip and you do not, that is usually why.

The pension rate itself changed on 1 January 2026 — from 9% to 9.5%, the first change since 1998, rising 0.5 percentage points a year to reach 13% in 2033 under Article 88 of the National Pension Act and Article 4 of its Addenda. For a workplace-based subscriber it is split equally, so each side pays 4.75% of the reference monthly income. NPS's own figures corroborate the split: at the 2026 upper limit of ₩6,590,000 the total premium is ₩626,050 and each side pays ₩313,025. The reference-income band for 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027 runs from ₩410,000 (up from ₩400,000) to ₩6,590,000 (up from ₩6,370,000).

Health insurance moved for 2026 as well: 7.19% of remuneration for a workplace-based subscriber (직장가입자), up 0.1 percentage points, which MOHW describes as a 1.48% increase from the previous year. It is split 50/50 with the employer under Article 76(1) of the National Health Insurance Act (국민건강보험법), so your own share is 3.595% of remuneration, and your employer must deduct it and notify you of the amount deducted under Article 77(3). MOHW puts the average employee's own monthly share at ₩160,699 in 2026, up ₩2,235 from ₩158,464 in 2025.

Long-term care insurance (장기요양보험) is 0.9448% of income for 2026, up from 0.9182% in 2025, and is billed as 13.14% of the health insurance premium — which is why it inherits the same 50/50 split.

Health cover is not optional once you have registered. An E-9 or H-2 worker who has completed foreign registration becomes a workplace-based subscriber under Article 109(2)3 of the National Health Insurance Act and Article 14 of the Act on the Employment of Foreign Workers, and the employer must report the hire to the National Health Insurance Service (국민건강보험공단) within 14 days under Article 8(2) of the National Health Insurance Act.

Employment insurance splits into two accounts. The unemployment-benefit account (실업급여) is 1.8% of remuneration, split evenly at 0.9% each. The employment-stabilisation and vocational-development account is the employer's alone: 0.25% under 150 employees, 0.45% at 150 or more for a priority-support enterprise, 0.65% from 150 to under 1,000, and 0.85% at 1,000 or more and for direct national or local-government projects. Article 10-2(1) of the Employment Insurance Act (고용보험법) applies the Act to EPS workers by default, with a proviso that Chapters 4 and 5 apply only on an application made under Ministry rules — so the employer-paid account is automatic, while unemployment benefit and parental-leave and maternity-leave benefits need you to apply.

One line should never appear in your deductions column: industrial-accident insurance (산재보험). It is paid 100% by the employer. Article 13(2) of the Premium Collection Act (고용산재보험료징수법) defines the worker's contribution as the unemployment-benefit half of the employment insurance premium only, and Article 13(5) puts the industrial-accident insurance premium entirely on the employer. If you see it deducted, the payslip is wrong.

For reference, MOEL Notice No. 2025-91 (고용노동부고시 제2025-91호) sets the 2026 industrial-accident insurance rates by industry in per-mille of payroll, effective 1 January to 31 December 2026: food manufacturing 16/1,000; construction 35/1,000; agriculture 20/1,000; fishery 27/1,000; wholesale, retail, restaurant and lodging 8/1,000; coal mining and quarrying 185/1,000; overseas-posted workers 14/1,000. The commuting-accident rate is the same for every industry at 0.6/1,000.

We do not publish a net take-home figure, and no authority publishes one either. The deductions above vary by nationality, by employer size and by elected tax treatment, so a single number would be a guess wearing the clothes of a fact. Treat any site that hands you one with suspicion.

An industrial-accident insurance line in your deductions is not a rounding error. It is money that should not have left your pay, and it is worth asking for back.

The four EPS-only insurances

On top of the statutory four, the EPS has four insurances of its own. Two are paid by your employer and two by you.

Your employer pays departure guarantee insurance (출국만기보험), accumulating 8.3% of the monthly ordinary wage every month, and must enrol within 15 days from the date the employment contract takes effect — but only where you have 1 year or more of permitted employment period remaining under Article 21(1)2 of the Enforcement Decree to the Act on the Employment of Foreign Workers. It also pays wage-arrears guarantee insurance (임금체불 보증보험) at ₩15,000 per worker per year, with a payout limit of ₩4,000,000 per worker under the MOEL Notice on the Guarantee Amount for Foreign Workers' Wage-Payment Guarantee Insurance (외국인근로자 임금지급 보증보험의 보증금액 고시). That one is required only for workplaces where the Wage Claim Guarantee Act (임금채권보장법) does not apply or with fewer than 300 employees, and not for construction employers of H-2 workers under Article 27(1) of the Enforcement Decree.

You pay the other two. Return cost insurance (귀국비용보험), under Article 15(1) of the Act on the Employment of Foreign Workers, costs ₩400,000 to ₩600,000 by country and must be taken out within 3 months from the date the employment contract takes effect under Article 22(1) of the Enforcement Decree: ₩400,000 for China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam; ₩500,000 for Mongolia; ₩600,000 for Sri Lanka; ₩500,000 for other countries. Casualty insurance (상해보험), under Article 28(2) of the Enforcement Decree, costs approximately ₩20,000 for 3 years, depending on sex and age, and must be taken out within 15 days. It covers death and illness other than occupational accidents, with payouts of up to ₩30,000,000 for accidental death or permanent disability and ₩15,000,000 for death by disease or severe disability.

Once the monthly number checks out, the next question is usually what happens at the end. Our severance guide covers the formula, the 14-day deadline and what to do when the money does not arrive.