Korean Reduced Working Hours Benefit Calculator

Cutting your working hours to look after a child means a smaller pay packet. Employment insurance makes up part of the lost wage through the reduced working hours benefit. Enter your monthly ordinary wage, weekly hours before and after the cut, how many months it lasts, and your insured days, and this calculator shows the monthly benefit and the total over the whole period. It also adds the wage you keep receiving from your employer to give a monthly take-home figure, so you can set it against parental leave, where you stop working altogether.

The distinctive feature of this scheme is that not every hour cut is worth the same. The first 10 hours cut each week are calculated on your full ordinary wage; anything beyond that is calculated on 80% of it. So the page shows the two bands separately, and tells you what each additional hour cut is worth in each band.

Parents deciding how many hours to cut before they apply. Because the per-hour replacement differs between the first 10 hours and the rest, the replacement rate changes a lot depending on whether you cut 10 hours or 20. Enter both and compare the monthly take-home side by side to see which fits the household budget.

It also helps anyone choosing between parental leave and reduced hours. On leave, wages stop and you receive only the benefit; on reduced hours, you receive a benefit for part of the hours cut and your employer keeps paying for the hours you still work. Comparing benefit amounts alone makes leave look bigger, but monthly take-home can tell a different story. If your insured days fall short of 180, you are not eligible at all, so recent hires should check that first.

Eligibility is set by 고용보험법 제73조의2제1항. You must reduce your hours for at least 30 days and have at least 180 insured days before the reduction starts. Under 제2항 of the same Article, the claim must be made from one month after the reduction begins until 12 months after it ends.

The amount follows the formula in 고용보험법 시행령 제104조의2제2항. The first block covers the first 10 hours cut each week: monthly ordinary wage, multiplied by 10, divided by the weekly hours before the cut. The wage used here is capped at ₩2.5 million and floored at ₩500,000. If you cut fewer than 10 hours, the actual hours cut replace the 10. The second block covers the remaining hours: 80% of the monthly ordinary wage, multiplied by the hours before minus the hours after minus 10, again divided by the hours before the cut. Here the 80% figure is capped at ₩1.6 million and floored at ₩500,000.

The point that matters most is that both blocks divide by the hours before the cut, not after. Going from 40 to 30 hours is 10 over 40, a quarter, not a third. The calculator adds the two blocks for the monthly benefit and multiplies by the number of months for the total. The wage from your employer is assumed to fall in proportion to the hours cut.

Take someone on a monthly ordinary wage of ₩3,000,000 who goes from 40 hours a week to 20 for 12 months. ₩3,000,000 is above the first-band cap of ₩2.5 million, so ₩2.5 million is used: times 10, divided by 40, gives ₩625,000 for the first 10 hours. For the other 10 hours, 80% of ₩3,000,000 is ₩2,400,000, above the ₩1.6 million cap, so ₩1.6 million is used: times 10, divided by 40, gives ₩400,000. Together that is ₩1,025,000 a month and ₩12,300,000 over 12 months. The employer still pays half the wage, ₩1,500,000, so monthly take-home is ₩2,525,000, and 68.3% of the ₩1,500,000 lost is replaced.

If the same person cuts only 10 hours, to 30 a week, only the first band applies: ₩625,000 a month and ₩7,500,000 over the year. With ₩2,250,000 from the employer, take-home is ₩2,875,000, and 83.3% of the ₩750,000 lost is replaced. Per hour, the first 10 hours are worth ₩62,500 each and every hour beyond them ₩40,000, so the replacement thins out the further you go.

The most common error is expecting a 20-hour cut to pay twice what a 10-hour cut does. The second 10 hours use the 80% base and a lower cap, so they pay less than the first. The second error is dividing by the hours after the cut. The denominator is the hours before, and dividing wrongly inflates the benefit. The third is forgetting the caps. Once the ordinary wage passes ₩2.5 million the first band stops growing, and once 80% of it passes ₩1.6 million the second band stops too, which is why higher earners see a lower replacement rate.

The fourth is confusing the floor with parental leave's. The floor here is ₩500,000, and it is a different figure. The fifth is the claim deadline: miss the 12-month window after the reduction ends and the benefit is lost. Finally, this calculator assumes whole months. A partial month is divided by its number of days and paid only for the days actually reduced, so the first and last months can differ from the figures here. Who may take reduced hours, and for how long, is set separately by 남녀고용평등과 일·가정 양립 지원에 관한 법률 제19조의2, so check that before applying to your employer.