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Korean Unemployment Benefit Calculator
Updated for 2026. The daily cap has gone up from 66,000 won to 68,100 won, the first rise in seven years. Enter a few details and this works out what you get per day, for how many days, and how much in total.
The monthly average of what you were paid over your last three months. Use the figure before tax and the four major insurances come out, and include bonuses.
Not just your current job — time with previous employers counts too. But if you have drawn unemployment benefit before, everything up to that point is wiped. You can look up your exact record on the employment insurance website.
Your age on your last day of work. If you are 50 or over, or registered as disabled, you get up to 30 extra days.
Part-time workers on fewer than eight hours a day get a proportionally lower floor. Most people should leave this at 8.
Estimated total payout
See the full calculation
The cap rose in 2026 for the first time in seven years
Job seeker's allowance (구직급여) has a daily cap and a daily floor. The floor is tied to the minimum wage: 80% of it, multiplied by eight hours. The 2026 minimum wage is 10,320 won an hour, so the floor works out at 10,320 × 80% × 8 = 66,048 won.
The cap, though, had been frozen at 66,000 won since 2019. The minimum wage kept climbing while the cap stood still, and by 2026 the floor was about to overtake the cap altogether. So the government lifted the cap to 68,100 won.
Here is the thing worth knowing. The gap between the cap and the floor is only 2,052 won a day. The benefit is meant to be 60% of your average wage before leaving, but that band is so narrow that almost everyone lands on one end or the other.
In practice, if your average monthly pay was around 3.34 million won or less, you get the floor, and if it was around 3.45 million won or more, you get the cap. Only people in the roughly 100,000-won window between the two actually receive 60% of their wage. That is why someone earning 50 million won a year and someone earning 100 million both get the same 68,100 won a day, or about 2.04 million won a month.
How long the payments last
This is your prescribed benefit days (소정급여일수), and it depends on how long you were covered by employment insurance and how old you are. Your salary makes no difference to it.
| Employment insurance coverage | Under 50 | 50+ or disabled |
|---|---|---|
| Under 1 year | 120 days | 120 days |
| 1 to 3 years | 150 days | 180 days |
| 3 to 5 years | 180 days | 210 days |
| 5 to 10 years | 210 days | 240 days |
| 10 years or more | 240 days | 270 days |
Coverage adds up across previous employers. Even if you changed jobs often, every stretch where you were enrolled in employment insurance counts. The one exception is that if you claimed unemployment benefit somewhere along the way, everything before that claim resets to zero.
Who qualifies
You need to meet all three of these.
First, you must have at least 180 insured days in the 18 months before you left. Those 180 days are not six months on the calendar — they are the total number of days you were actually paid for. On a five-day week you also get credit for the weekly paid holiday, so about six days a week count, which means you usually need seven to eight months on the job to reach 180. This is why people who work exactly six months and then apply get turned down.
Second, the separation must have been involuntary: you were asked to leave, your contract ran out, the business closed, or you were made redundant. If you quit of your own accord, as a rule you get nothing.
Third, you must be able and willing to work but currently without a job, and you have to genuinely look for work while you are claiming.
Quitting does not always rule you out
If you resigned for a reason the system accepts as justified, you can still claim. That covers unpaid or late wages, pay below the minimum wage, unlawful treatment by your employer, workplace harassment, a commute that grew to three hours or more round trip, and needing to care for yourself or a family member when your employer refused to give you leave, among others. In these situations it matters enormously that you keep evidence — pay slips, emails giving you notice, records of your hours.
The decisive document is the separation reason code on the 이직확인서, the leaving confirmation your employer files with employment insurance. If it does not match what actually happened, you can ask for it to be corrected.
How to apply
When you leave, your employer reports the end of your employment insurance coverage and files the leaving confirmation. Once that has gone through, you register as a job seeker on Work-Net, take the online orientation for claimants on the employment insurance website, then visit the employment center (고용센터) for your area to apply to have your eligibility recognised.
Do not let the deadline slip. Twelve months after the day you left, the claim closes, even if you have days left unpaid. Unused prescribed benefit days simply disappear. Apply as soon as you can after leaving.
Once you are approved, the first seven days are a waiting period with no payment. After that, money arrives as you check in for unemployment recognition, usually every one to four weeks.
What foreign workers should know
Eligibility here has nothing to do with your nationality. It rests entirely on whether you paid into employment insurance (고용보험). The catch is that whether enrolment is mandatory depends on your visa. For some statuses it is compulsory, for others it is optional or granted only on a reciprocity basis with your home country, which means plenty of foreign residents in Korea were never enrolled and only discover it when they try to claim. Check an old pay slip for a 고용보험 deduction, or confirm your enrolment on the employment insurance website or in person at a 고용센터. Do this before you count on the money.
The rest works the same as it does for Korean nationals. Resigning generally disqualifies you, because this benefit exists for people who lost work involuntarily — though a contract simply reaching its end date does count as involuntary, which is how a lot of foreign workers on fixed-term contracts qualify. You file at your local employment center, register as a job seeker, and report your job-search activity every one to four weeks. First-time applicants have to complete an online orientation before the visit. Bring your ARC and be ready for the process to run mostly in Korean; some centers can help in other languages, but do not assume it.
One more thing that is easy to miss. If your visa is sponsored by your employer, losing the job can affect your right to stay in Korea, and that is a separate question from the benefit. The immigration side and the employment-insurance side are handled by different offices and neither one resolves the other, so you need to deal with both, usually within a short window. For visa questions, call the Immigration Contact Center on 1345, which offers help in several languages. For labor and unemployment benefit questions, call 1350. This page is general information rather than legal advice, and individual cases turn on details, so confirm anything important with them directly.
Common questions
The number here does not match what I actually received
This calculator covers the standard case. Your real average daily wage (평균임금) is the total pay from your last three months divided by the number of days in that period, and the way bonuses and unused-leave pay feed into it gets fiddly. That said, as explained above, most people land on either the cap or the floor, so even a fairly different average wage often produces the same result.
Can I work part-time while claiming?
Yes, but you must declare it on your unemployment recognition date. Earning money without declaring it counts as fraudulent receipt: you repay what you took, face an additional penalty on top, and can be prosecuted. If what you earn in a day passes a set threshold, that day is treated as employment and is not paid.
What is the early reemployment allowance?
If you find a new job with more than half of your prescribed benefit days still unused, and you stay in that job for at least 12 months, you can claim half of the remaining days as a bonus. So if you had 210 days and started work with 120 left, you get another 60 days' worth. The point is to make finding work quickly no worse for you than riding out the full claim.
Does severance pay or unused-leave pay reduce my benefit?
No. Severance and unused-leave pay are compensation for work you already did, and they sit entirely apart from unemployment benefit. They can, however, feed into the average wage calculation. Have a look at the severance pay calculator and the annual leave calculator for those.
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