Overtime, Night and Holiday Pay: The Stacking Rules

Premium pay in Korea is not one rate with exceptions. It is three separate grounds — extended work, night work, holiday work — that combine according to rules people routinely get wrong in both directions: paying too little for a night shift, and too much for a long holiday.

Underneath all of them sits ordinary wage, which is not base pay and which moved in 2024.

The morning guide is the hours cap. This one is the money.

Extended work: 50% added

Article 56 requires at least 50% of ordinary wage added for statutory extended work.

At an hourly ordinary wage of ₩15,000, two hours of weekday extended work:

base       ₩15,000 × 2          = ₩30,000
premium    ₩15,000 × 2 × 50%    = ₩15,000
                                  ────────
                                   ₩45,000

Or, as it is normally computed, ₩15,000 × 2 × 150%.

Night work: 22:00 to 06:00

The night window is 22:00 to 06:00 the following day, and it is stated in the statute rather than derived.

Night work attracts its own 50%. If the hour is inside statutory hours, that is 150%. If the hour is also extended work, both grounds apply:

base                    100%
extended work          + 50%
night work             + 50%
                        ────
                        200%

Two hours of extended work after 22:00, at ₩15,000:

₩15,000 × 2 × 200%  =  ₩60,000

Holiday work has its own two tiers

Holiday work is regulated separately under Article 56(2), at 50% within eight hours and 100% beyond.

Which produces the full table:

Do not add an extended premium to holiday work

Ten hours worked on a holiday:

first 8 hours     150%
beyond 8 hours    200%

Reasoning that the week also passed 40 hours and adding a further 50% to reach 250% does not match how Article 56 handles holiday work. The statute has already fixed the higher rate for the hours beyond eight — that is the treatment of the excess.

The overtime pay calculator takes the hours by ground and applies these rates, and checks the cap separately from the pay.

Ordinary wage is the multiplicand, and it is not base pay

Every rate above is a multiple of ordinary wage, so the scope of ordinary wage decides more money than any individual rate does.

An en banc Supreme Court decision in 2024 discarded the fixedness requirement, leaving regularity and uniformity as the test. Position allowances, qualification allowances and certain bonuses paid regularly and uniformly as consideration for contractual work therefore fall to be reassessed.

209 is a common divisor, not a universal one

For a monthly-paid employee on a 40-hour week with eight paid weekly holiday hours, the hourly ordinary wage is normally the monthly ordinary wage over 209 conversion hours:

₩3,135,000 ÷ 209  =  ₩15,000

But the conversion figure follows the contract. Different contractual hours or a different paid holiday structure give a different divisor, and using 209 anyway produces an hourly rate that is too low — which then understates every premium computed from it. Where the 209 comes from is in Korea’s minimum wage and the 209-hour month.

Comprehensive wage and fixed overtime are different things

They are used interchangeably in practice and they are not the same.

A genuine comprehensive wage arrangement is exceptional. Whether one is effective is assessed on the whole picture — whether the nature of the work makes hours genuinely hard to compute, whether there was an actual agreement, and whether it disadvantages the employee.

Fixed overtime is a floor, not a ceiling

A contract paying 20 hours of extended work a month:

So fixed overtime is not an agreement that hours beyond the stated number are unpaid. And it does not remove the duty to record hours — without the record, nobody can tell which of the three cases above applies.

Proving the hours

A claim for unpaid premiums turns on establishing the hours actually worked. Usable records include attendance and access logs, PC login and logout times, work messaging, email timestamps, rosters, work reports, and late-night taxi and meal claims.

Being in the building is not the test on its own, though. What matters is whether the time was spent working, or waiting for work, under the employer’s direction — which is the same standard the morning guide applies to the cap.

The sequence

ordinary headcount
  → contractual hours, and hours actually worked
  → which hours are extended, night, holiday
  → ordinary wage, on the current test
  → hourly ordinary wage, on the right divisor
  → statutory premium for each ground
  → less fixed overtime already paid
  → the difference

Unpaid premiums are a wage claim: raise it with the employer, then with the local labour office, and the Ministry’s counselling line is 1350. How the components should have appeared in the first place is in reading your Korean payslip, and what the contract should have said about hours and fixed overtime is in your Korean employment contract.

The sentence to stop accepting is “we are a comprehensive wage company, so there is no overtime pay.” Whether such an arrangement exists, whether it is effective, whether the hours can be measured, whether the amount falls short of the statutory figure, and whether the cap was respected are five separate questions with five separate answers.