Six Out of Ten Companies to Take Five Days Off for the Lunar New Year Holiday

KEF Survey on Lunar New Year Holidays
58.7% of Companies to Pay Lunar New Year Bonuses

Six out of ten domestic companies are taking five days off for this year's Lunar New Year holiday.

On the 8th, the Korea Employers Federation (KEF) announced that, based on its "Lunar New Year Holiday Status Survey" of 447 companies nationwide with five or more employees, 64.8% of the companies that will close for Lunar New Year are closing for five days.

This year's Lunar New Year holiday runs from the weekend (February 14 to 15) through the Lunar New Year public holidays (February 16 to 18). The shares of responses for "four days or fewer" and "six days or more" were 26.1% and 9.2%, respectively. Here, among the companies taking more than five days off, that is, "six days or more," 59.4% cited "mandatory closure under collective agreements and work rules" as the reason.

Travelers returning to their hometowns are moving to board trains at Seoul Station in Yongsan District, Seoul. Photo by Cho Yongjun

By company size, the share of responses indicating "six days or more off" was higher among companies with 300 or more employees (22.7%) than among those with fewer than 300 employees (7.6%). The proportion of companies that said they would pay a Lunar New Year bonus this year was 58.7%, down 2.8 percentage points from last year (61.5%).

In terms of how the Lunar New Year bonus will be paid, the most common response was "paid only as a regular bonus" (66.3%). This was followed by "paid only as a separate bonus" (28.6%) and "paid as both a regular bonus and a separate bonus" (5.2%). A separate bonus refers to a bonus granted at the employer's discretion, rather than a regularly paid bonus specified in collective agreements or work rules. Among the companies that said they would pay a separate bonus, 85.7% responded that they would pay it at a similar level to last year.

When asked about business conditions for this year's Lunar New Year, the most common answer, at 55.6%, was that they would be "similar to last year." However, the share of respondents who said that business conditions for this year's Lunar New Year had "deteriorated compared with last year" was 39.5%, a sharp decrease of 21.0 percentage points from last year's survey (60.5%).

Meanwhile, KEF noted that, in response to a question about this year's operating profit outlook, 50.9% of responding companies chose "increase compared with last year." The share of responses indicating "decrease compared with last year" was 36.0%.