Chuseok Falls Over a Saturday This Year — and Korean Law Gives Nothing Back

Chuseok 2026 runs from Thursday 24 September to Saturday 26 September, with Chuseok itself on Friday the 25th. The Saturday is the third day of the holiday and it is simply lost — Korea grants a substitute weekday for Seollal and Chuseok only when one of the three days meets a Sunday. Monday 28 September is a normal working day.

That is not an oversight in the calendar. It is a distinction drawn in Article 3 of the Regulations on Public Holidays of Government Offices, and it treats two Saturdays in the same autumn completely differently. National Foundation Day on Saturday 3 October buys employees a substitute Monday on 5 October. The last day of Chuseok, one week earlier and also a Saturday, buys nothing.

Which holidays give a Saturday back, and which do not

The substitute-holiday rule is not a single rule. It is three categories, and the category a holiday sits in decides whether a Saturday collision costs employees a day.

The logic is historical rather than principled. Seollal and Chuseok each already carry three days, and when substitution was introduced the policy judgement was that a three-day block colliding with a Saturday still leaves two weekdays off. The national-flag holidays and the single-day cultural holidays are one day each, so a Saturday collision wipes them out entirely — hence the wider protection.

For a payroll calendar the practical effect in 2026 is a pair of near-identical Saturdays with opposite outcomes, ten days apart.

The 2026 holidays that still matter

Most of the year is behind us. What is left runs from Chuseok to the end of December, and it contains one substitute Monday and two three-day weekends.

Earlier in the year the same rule produced a substitute Monday on 17 August for Liberation Day, which fell on Saturday 15 August, while Memorial Day on Saturday 6 June produced nothing. Those four Saturday collisions — 6 June, 15 August, 26 September and 3 October — are the whole reason 2026 is a day shorter than 2025 for anyone on a five-day week.

Are public holidays paid at all in Korea?

They are, but only from five employees upward, and only since fairly recently.

Article 55(1) of the Labor Standards Act has long required at least one paid holiday a week on average — the weekly rest day, usually Sunday. Article 55(2), inserted in March 2018, went further and required employers to guarantee “the holidays prescribed by Presidential Decree” as paid. Article 30(2) of the Enforcement Decree defines those as the government-office holidays, excluding Sundays, plus substitute holidays. In other words the red days on the Korean calendar became a private-sector entitlement rather than a public-sector one.

The duty was phased in by headcount: workplaces with 300 or more employees from 1 January 2020, those with 30 to 299 from 1 January 2021, and those with 5 to 29 from 1 January 2022. Below five regularly employed people, Article 55(2) does not apply at all — and neither does Article 56, which is where the premium rates live. For a four-person representative office a public holiday is whatever the employment contract or the rules of employment say it is.

The headcount is taken on the Korean employing entity. A subsidiary of a 40,000-person group that employs six people in Seoul is a six-person workplace for this purpose, and crossed into scope on 1 January 2022 like any other small company.

What Chuseok work actually costs

If someone works on 25 September, Article 56(2) sets the premium: 50% of ordinary wages on top of normal pay for the first eight hours, and 100% on top beyond eight hours. Night work between 22:00 and 06:00 adds a further 50% under Article 56(3), and that one does stack — a holiday night shift attracts both.

For a monthly-salaried employee the arithmetic trips people up because the base day is already inside the salary. Take an employee whose ordinary hourly wage is 20,000 won and who works ten hours on Chuseok:

• eight hours × 20,000 × 50% = 80,000 won
• two hours × 20,000 × 100% = 40,000 won
• plus two hours × 20,000 = 40,000 won of base pay for the hours beyond the contracted eight

The monthly salary already covers the first eight hours of base pay, so the payslip gains 160,000 won, not 360,000. Getting this the other way round — paying a full extra day plus premium — is expensive and, once done, very hard to walk back, because a consistently applied overpayment starts to look like a term of employment.

You can move a public holiday — in writing, and only in writing

Manufacturers and service businesses that cannot simply close often want to swap a holiday for a different day. Korean law permits it. The proviso to Article 55(2) allows a public holiday to be substituted for a specified working day where the employer has a written agreement with the employee representative — a union organised by a majority of employees, or where there is none, a person representing a majority of them.

Three things about that mechanism are worth stating plainly, because each of them is a place foreign-owned entities go wrong.

It must be in writing and it must be with the representative, not with the individual employee. An email exchange with the person being asked to work is not a 휴일대체 and does not remove the premium obligation.

It must be agreed in advance, and the substituted day must be identified. Telling staff after Chuseok that they may take a day “sometime in October” is not substitution; it is unpaid holiday work with a vague promise attached.

Where substitution is validly done, the original holiday becomes an ordinary working day and the nominated day becomes the paid holiday. No premium is due for working the original day — that is the entire point of the mechanism, and it is why the formality exists.

The part that is not on the calendar

Two more things sit alongside the dates and get missed.

Substitute holidays are public holidays in their own right. Monday 5 October is not a discretionary day of grace; it is a paid holiday under Article 55(2) on exactly the same footing as 3 October itself, with the same premium if someone works it.

And a public holiday falling inside a period of annual leave does not consume a day of that leave, because it was never a working day to begin with. An employee who books 24 to 30 September off spends leave on 28, 29 and 30 September only. Systems configured on a foreign holiday calendar routinely deduct all five, and the correction is owed as leave, not as cash.

None of this is difficult. It is, however, exactly the kind of detail that a payroll run managed from another timezone gets wrong once a year, in September, at speed. If you would rather it were somebody’s job, that is what our payroll outsourcing service is for — the Korean holiday calendar, the premium calculations and the ordinary-wage base are maintained as a matter of course rather than reconstructed each autumn.

Figures current as at 29 August 2026, verified against the 2026 월력요항 published by the Korea AeroSpace Administration, the Regulations on Public Holidays of Government Offices, and Articles 55 and 56 of the Labor Standards Act. Holiday dates for a given year are fixed by the annual 월력요항; temporary public holidays may be added at any time by resolution of the State Council.