When annual leave accrues and when it expires

What annual paid leave is

Article 60(1) of the Labor Standards Act provides that an employer shall grant 15 days of paid leave to a worker who has attended at least 80 percent of working days over one year. Paid is the operative word. You are not at work and you are still paid. In Korean this is called yeoncha, and company documents call it annual paid leave.

It resembles the weekly paid holiday in that both pay you for a day you do not work, but the character is different. The weekly holiday attaches automatically when you complete a week. Annual leave is something you claim for the days you choose. Article 60(5) says the employer shall grant it at the time the worker requests, and may move it only where granting it then would seriously disrupt business.

Workers under a year have it too. Article 60(2) provides one day of paid leave for each month worked without absence, for a worker whose continuous service is under one year. So from your second month you have a day to use, and up to 11 days accumulate before your first anniversary.

The rules the statute sets

How many days comes from Article 60. Complete a year having attended at least 80 percent of working days and you get the 15 days of paragraph 1. Under a year, or below 80 percent, you fall under paragraph 2 and get one day per fully attended month. The two are not mutually exclusive. In your first year you accumulate month by month under paragraph 2, and the moment you complete the year the 15 days of paragraph 1 appears separately.

Long service adds days. Article 60(4) provides that a worker with three or more years of continuous service receives one additional day for every 2 years of continuous service beyond the first year, and that the total including the addition is capped at 25 days. The period being 2 years is the part people get wrong. Three years gives sixteen days, four years also gives sixteen, and five years gives seventeen. Twenty one years reaches 25 days, and it stops there.

Some workers are outside it altogether. Article 18(3) provides that Articles 55 and 60 do not apply to a worker whose contracted hours, averaged over 4 weeks, come to less than 15 hours a week. Article 60 drops out entirely, so there is no annual leave. It is the same provision that removes the weekly paid holiday.

Five kinds of absence are not counted against you when the attendance rate is computed. Article 60(6) treats as attendance: time off for a work related injury or illness, time off taken by a pregnant worker under Article 74, childcare leave, hours reduced under the childcare hours reduction scheme, and hours reduced under the pregnancy hours reduction scheme. The last two were added recently.

How long you have comes from Article 60(7). Leave under paragraphs 1, 2 and 4 lapses if not exercised within one year, and a parenthesis sets a different rule for the paragraph 2 leave of a worker under one year of service, which lasts until the end of the first year of work. So there are two expiry rules. Leave you could not use because of the employer does not lapse.

What this calculator does

This section describes what the code actually does, in order. It takes your start date and the as of date, and builds every batch of leave that accrued between them. First the monthly batches under Article 60(2), from your first completed month through your eleventh, and then the yearly batches under Article 60(1), one on each anniversary.

Months and years are counted under Article 160 of the Civil Act. A period fixed in months is computed by the calendar, expires on the day before the corresponding day in the final month, and where the final month has no corresponding day, expires on the last day of that month. Employment periods include the first day, so for someone who started on 1 January the first month ends on 31 January and the leave accrues on 1 February. Someone who started on 31 January has no 31st in February, so the first month ends on 28 February and the leave accrues on 1 March.

Each batch then gets its last usable day. Monthly batches all end on the day before the first anniversary, whichever month they accrued in. A yearly batch runs from its anniversary to the day before the next one. Batches whose last usable day is behind the as of date are marked expired and taken out of the remaining count.

The long service addition is computed from years of service. Below three years it is zero. From three years it is the number of years minus one, divided by 2, rounded down. That is added to the 15 days and then cut at 25 days. At twenty one years the addition reaches ten days and hits the cap, and after that the arithmetic keeps rising but the cap holds.

If you say your attendance was below 80 percent, only the most recent year switches to paragraph 2. The number of fully attended months becomes the number of days, and no long service addition is applied, because Article 60(4) attaches the addition to the paragraph 1 leave. The calculator does not know which months you attended fully, so it groups the accrual on the day that year began.

Bridge planning runs separately. Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays are painted as days off, and the working days that sit between two runs of days off become the leave you would spend. Only windows that cannot be extended by a further day at either end become plans, and only windows containing a public holiday are kept. Taking a Friday off for a three day weekend works in any week, so listing those gives fifty two lines of noise rather than an answer. For each holiday the calculator picks the longest run available at each leave count from one up to 5 days and lays them side by side.

The promotion dates all come from a single last usable day. The day that is a given number of months before the end is taken as the day from which exactly that many months remain, and a deadline expressed as that many months before is taken as the day before it. Within so many days of a reference counts the reference day as the first.

Copying the result link only puts your values into the address as parameters. Nothing is stored on a server, and the person who opens the link runs the same calculation in their own browser.

Filling in the form

The start date is the first working day in your employment contract. A probation period counts towards continuous service, so use the day you first came to work rather than the day probation ended.

Days already taken means days taken out of the leave you currently hold. If you had leave left over from a batch that has since expired, leave that out. How half days are counted varies between employers. This calculator works in whole days, so treating two half days as one day will usually be right.

The attendance question looks only at the past year. 80 percent means the share of scheduled working days you actually attended, so with 250 scheduled days you need 200 or more. Your employer's attendance records are the accurate source. If it is borderline, answer yes here and ask your employer to confirm.

You can leave the weekly hours blank if you are not sure. Blank is treated as covered by the statute. Fill it in if your hours hover around 15 hours a week. Use the hours in your contract rather than the hours you actually worked.

The promotion procedure and fiscal year alignment

Article 61 sets out a procedure by which an employer presses a worker to use leave, and the effect of completing it. Where the employer took every step and the worker still did not use the leave, the employer owes no compensation for it and it is not treated as the employer's fault under the proviso to Article 60(7). Skip a step or miss a date and that effect does not arise.

For a worker with a year or more of service, Article 61(1) applies. Within ten days of the reference point six months before the leave lapses, the employer must tell each worker in writing how many days remain and ask them to name the dates. If the worker does not reply within ten days of receiving that, the employer must set the dates and notify the worker in writing by two months before the end. For an employer aligned to a fiscal year ending 31 December, that means writing between 1 and 10 July and designating by 31 October.

The monthly leave of a worker under one year is handled separately by Article 61(2), because paragraph 1 excludes it in a parenthesis. The employer writes within ten days of the reference point three months before the end of the first year of work, and designates by one month before the end. For leave that accrues after that notice the cycle runs again, this time within five days of the reference point one month before the end, with designation by ten days before the end. Five days rather than ten, and ten days before rather than a month.

Because the statute does not fix where each stretch begins, practice can differ. This calculator counts back under Article 160 of the Civil Act and prints how it read the dates. If your employer's dates differ from these, it is not necessarily that one of you is wrong, so for a dispute confirm with the Ministry of Employment and Labor at 1350.

Fiscal year alignment is not in the statute. The words fiscal year appear nowhere in Article 60, and every date in Article 61 derives from the start date. Aligning everyone to 1 January is a payroll practice. It makes administration easier at the cost of drifting away from each person's own start date. Whichever basis is used, it may not leave a worker worse off than the statute, because Article 3 of the Labor Standards Act makes these standards a floor.

What allows this method is the Ministry of Employment and Labor's administrative interpretation, not the statute. The Ministry's counselling answers on its website say an employer may set the fiscal year as everyone's reference date through collective agreements or work rules, for ease of administration. If you joined partway through a year, you get leave on the next 1 January in proportion to your service that year, worked out as 15 days times days attended divided by scheduled working days in the year. When you leave, any shortfall against the start date method is paid out as unused leave pay (근로개선정책과-5352, 2011.12.19.). If the fiscal year method gave you more, it stands unless the work rules say leave is recounted from the start date on exit (임금근로시간정책팀-489, 2008.02.28.). At launch we only searched the Ministry of Government Legislation's interpretations and missed this. We opened the Ministry's answers on 2026-09-24, and there is now a separate calculator that runs both methods side by side.

Where people get stuck

The claim that a first year gives only 15 days describes the law before 28 November 2017. Article 60(3) was deleted then, and days taken before the first anniversary are no longer subtracted from the 15 days. So across the first two years the maximum is 26 days. The earlier 11 days can only be used up to the day before that anniversary, so you never hold both batches at once.

One more day every three years is also not what the statute says. The period in Article 60(4) is 2 years, and three years is simply when the addition first appears. Three and four years give the same figure, and five years adds one. Counting in threes drifts further from the truth the longer you stay.

That each batch lives separately is the thing most often missed. A single remaining number can hide batches that accrued on different days and expire on different days. That is why this calculator shows them as a table rather than one figure.

A promotion notice does not make your leave disappear on arrival. The notice is one step in a procedure, and you can still use the leave up to the last usable day. If anything, the notice means there is still time.

If the employer is why you could not use it, it does not lapse. The proviso to Article 60(7) carves that out. What counts as the employer's fault is a question of fact, and this calculator does not decide it.

What happens to unused leave when you leave a job is out of scope here. Paying it out depends on what your ordinary wage is, which is a separate calculation.