In short: for 2026, Korea’s minimum wage is ₩10,320 per hour, or ₩2,156,880 per month for a standard full-time schedule (Ministry of Employment and Labor Notice No. 2025-47). For 2027, it rises to ₩10,700 per hour, or ₩2,236,300 per month (Ministry of Employment and Labor Notice No. 2026-60). The 2026 rate runs from January 1 to December 31, 2026, and the 2027 rate takes over on January 1, 2027.
The numbers
| Year | Hourly rate | Monthly rate (209 hours) | Applies |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | ₩10,320 | ₩2,156,880 | Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2026 |
| 2027 | ₩10,700 | ₩2,236,300 | Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2027 |
Source: Ministry of Employment and Labor Notice No. 2025-47 (issued August 5, 2025) for 2026, and Notice No. 2026-60 (issued August 5, 2026) for 2027.
Both figures apply to every industry — there is no separate rate by sector. The 2027 notice also states that no separate rate applies to piece-rate workers. The 2027 hourly rate is a ₩380 increase over 2026, which works out to about a 3.68% rise (₩380 ÷ ₩10,320). The monthly figure rises by the same proportion, from ₩2,156,880 to ₩2,236,300, because both monthly amounts are simply the hourly rate multiplied by 209.
The “monthly rate” in the table is not a separate legal number — it is what a worker on a standard 40-hour week, paid the hourly minimum wage, should receive in a month once weekly paid holiday time is folded in. That is what the “209 hours” is about.
Where the 209 hours comes from
Each year’s notice states the monthly figure as: “₩2,156,880 (or ₩2,236,300): based on 209 standard monthly hours (including 8 hours of paid weekly holiday), assuming 40 scheduled hours of work per week.” Two things feed into that 209-hour figure:
- Scheduled hours. The notice assumes a standard 40-hour working week.
- Weekly holiday hours. The Labor Standards Act requires an employer to guarantee employees at least one paid holiday per week on average (Labor Standards Act, Article 55(1)). For a worker on a 40-hour week, that paid weekly holiday is treated as worth 8 hours.
Add those together — 40 scheduled hours plus 8 paid holiday hours — and you get 48 hours of pay per week that the minimum wage has to cover, not just the 40 hours actually worked. The Enforcement Decree of the Minimum Wage Act sets out how a weekly or monthly wage is converted into an hourly figure for comparison purposes: a weekly wage is divided by the “standard hours for minimum wage application” for that week (scheduled hours plus hours paid under Article 55(1) of the Labor Standards Act), and a monthly wage is divided by that same weekly figure multiplied by the average number of weeks in a year, divided by 12 (Enforcement Decree of the Minimum Wage Act, Article 5(1)). Applying that to 48 hours a week produces the 209-hour monthly figure the annual notice publishes. In practice, this means a full-time employee’s monthly salary needs to cover not just the hours they clock in, but also their paid weekly holiday, when you check it against the minimum wage.
A note on translations: the Labor Standards Act cited above was most recently amended with a Korean effective date of August 20, 2026. The official English translation referenced for Articles 55 and 18 was published before that amendment, so if you are reading the English text of the Labor Standards Act, treat it as a guide and check the current Korean text for anything time-sensitive.
Who the minimum wage applies to
The core rule is short: an employer must pay any employee covered by the minimum wage at least the minimum wage amount, and cannot lower an existing wage level just because a new minimum wage has been set (Minimum Wage Act, Article 6(1)–(2)).
There are two narrow carve-outs written into the law:
- Ministry-authorized exemptions. The Minimum Wage Act’s core protection (Article 6) does not apply to (1) a person with a very limited working capacity due to a mental or physical disability, or (2) other employees for whom applying the minimum wage is deemed inappropriate — but only where the employer has first obtained the Minister of Employment and Labor’s authorization for that specific case, following the process set out by Presidential Decree (Minimum Wage Act, Article 7). This is not something an employer can decide on its own; it requires prior government sign-off.
- A reduced rate during early probation, in limited cases. For an employee under a labor contract of one year or longer, who is within the first three months of a probationary period, the employer may pay a lower hourly minimum wage — as prescribed by Presidential Decree — but not for jobs classified by the Ministry of Employment and Labor as simple labor (Minimum Wage Act, Article 5(2)). The Enforcement Decree spells out the reduction: 10% off the hourly minimum wage amount (Enforcement Decree of the Minimum Wage Act, Article 3). So for someone eligible for this reduction, the floor works out to about ₩9,288 per hour in 2026 and ₩9,630 per hour in 2027 (10,320 × 0.9 and 10,700 × 0.9, rounded). This reduction does not apply at all to contracts shorter than one year, or to jobs in the Ministry’s designated simple-labor categories — those workers get the full hourly minimum wage from day one.
Outside of those two carve-outs, coverage is broad: the Act does not limit itself by nationality or visa status, and part-time employees are covered too, with their conditions of employment — including how weekly holiday hours are counted — determined proportionally to a comparable full-time employee’s hours at the same workplace (Labor Standards Act, Article 18(1)).
Three worked examples
1. Hourly-paid worker, standard 40-hour week (2026). If you’re paid by the hour and work a full 40-hour week with no unauthorized absences, your employer owes you the hourly rate for the 40 hours worked, plus 8 hours of paid weekly holiday at the same hourly rate, under Article 55(1) of the Labor Standards Act. That’s 48 hours × ₩10,320 = ₩495,360 for the week. Multiplied out over a month, that’s the same ₩2,156,880 shown in the table above.
2. Monthly-paid worker (2026). If your contract states a flat monthly salary rather than an hourly rate, the check is whether that monthly figure, once converted to an hourly rate under the Enforcement Decree’s conversion formula (monthly wage ÷ 209 standard hours, for a standard 40-hour-week job), comes out to at least ₩10,320. A monthly salary of exactly ₩2,156,880 converts to ₩10,320 per hour (2,156,880 ÷ 209) — right at the floor. Anything below that monthly figure, for the same 209-hour schedule, falls short of the minimum wage.
3. Part-time worker, 20 scheduled hours a week (2027). Article 18(1) of the Labor Standards Act scales a part-time employee’s entitlements to the ratio of their hours against a comparable full-time employee. For someone scheduled 20 hours a week — half of the 40-hour full-time comparison — their weekly paid holiday hours scale down proportionally too: roughly 4 hours (half of the 8 hours used in the full-time calculation), for a total of about 24 hours a week that the minimum wage has to cover. Converting that to a monthly figure using the same method as the official notice (24 hours × average weeks per year ÷ 12) gives roughly 104.3 standard monthly hours. At the 2027 hourly rate of ₩10,700, that works out to roughly ₩1,116,000 a month — this is an illustrative calculation from the statutory formula, not a figure published in the Ministry’s notice, which only publishes the full-time 209-hour monthly figure.
If you’re paid less than the minimum wage
Under Article 6(3) of the Minimum Wage Act, any part of a wage agreement that sets pay below the minimum wage amount is void. The law does not just cancel that part of the agreement — it substitutes it: the void portion is treated as if the employer and employee had agreed to pay exactly the minimum wage amount instead. In other words, being paid under the minimum wage does not require negotiating a fix from scratch; the statutory minimum is already read into the contract in place of the below-minimum figure.
Three common misconceptions
“Only base pay counts toward the minimum wage.” Not since 2024. The Minimum Wage Act counts every wage paid regularly at least once a month (Minimum Wage Act, Article 6(4)). The main text of Article 6(4) still reads as if 25% of monthly bonuses and 7% of cash welfare payments (meal or transport allowances paid in cash) were excluded, but the 2018 amendment’s addenda phased those exclusion ratios down to 0% from 2024 (Minimum Wage Act, Addenda to Act No. 15666, Article 2). So a regular monthly bonus or a cash meal allowance now counts in full. What still does not count is pay for anything other than your scheduled hours or days — overtime premiums, for example — as specified by Ministry of Employment and Labor rule (Minimum Wage Act, Article 6(4)1), and benefits provided in kind rather than in cash (Minimum Wage Act, Article 6(4)3(a)).
“A monthly salary at or above the published monthly figure automatically satisfies the law.” The published monthly figure (₩2,156,880 for 2026, ₩2,236,300 for 2027) assumes a standard 40-hour week with 209 standard monthly hours. If your actual contracted hours are higher than that, the same monthly salary converts to a lower effective hourly rate, and could fall short even while nominally exceeding the published monthly number.
“Anyone in a probation period can be paid 10% less.” The 10% reduction under Article 3 of the Enforcement Decree only applies to employees under a labor contract of one year or longer, within their first three months, and it explicitly does not apply to jobs the Ministry of Employment and Labor has designated as simple labor. Someone hired on a contract shorter than a year gets the full minimum wage from their first day, probation or not.