How Overtime Pay Actually Works at a Korean Hagwon
Most hagwons pay overtime as a flat per-hour rate for classes beyond your contracted hours, worked out from your monthly salary — but the formula, the camp rate, and what even counts as "extra" differ by school, so check the actual clause before you sign.
Park English2026-09-153 min read
Your contract almost certainly lists a number of teaching hours per week. Anything past that number is overtime, at least in theory. What gets messy is how that hour gets priced, and whether your school even calls it overtime when it happens.
Here's the part nobody explains well: many Korean employers calculate an hourly wage from a monthly salary using 209 hours as the base — a figure built from a 40-hour week plus the weekly paid holiday required under Korean labor law. So a teacher on 2,500,000 won a month, divided by 209, comes out to roughly 11,960 won an hour. Some hagwons use that number as the floor for your overtime rate. Others just write a flat figure in the contract — say, 20,000 won per extra class — with no explanation of how they got there. Both are common. Neither is wrong on its face. But if your contract doesn't say which method it's using, you have no way to check your own paycheck against it.
Camp weeks are a separate problem. Winter and summer intensive camps, usually held in January and August, often pay a different rate than regular overtime — sometimes higher, sometimes folded into a "camp allowance" that isn't hourly at all. This varies enough by school and by year that we won't put a number on it here. Ask directly: what is the camp rate, and is it written anywhere, or promised verbally?
| Type of extra work | How it's usually paid | What to confirm before signing |
|---|---|---|
| Extra regular classes (subbing, added hours) | Flat hourly rate, sometimes tied to monthly salary ÷ contracted hours | Is the rate itself named in the contract, or just "overtime will be paid"? |
| Winter/summer camp | Per-hour or per-day rate, often separate from term-time overtime | Ask for the camp rate in writing before camp season, not during it |
| Covering a sick colleague's class | Sometimes unpaid if brief, sometimes paid the standard overtime rate | Ask where the line is — one class free, more than that paid |
| Parent-facing extras (open classes, phone calls home) | Frequently unpaid, treated as part of the job | Worth asking directly, since this one catches people off guard |
Before you sign, run through this short list:
- Find the clause that names your contracted weekly hours. If it's vague ("approximately"), ask for a number.
- Find the overtime rate. If it's not a number, ask what it's calculated from.
- Ask specifically about camp pay — the month, the rate, and whether it's separate from your regular salary.
- Ask how overtime gets recorded. A shared spreadsheet, a sign-in sheet, a verbal count at the end of the month — all three exist, and the ones with no paper trail are the ones worth asking more about.
- Get anything promised outside the printed contract added to the contract, or at minimum confirmed by text or email.
None of this is a red flag by itself. Most hagwons run overtime the same way month after month without issue. The point is to know the number before your first camp, not while you're comparing it to your payslip afterward.