Hoesik and Overtime: How a Korean Office Worker's Evening Actually Unfolds

6:30 p.m., Exit 4 of Euljiro 3-ga Station in Seoul. People with their neckties half loosened settle onto plastic tables in the alleys. Over in Yeouido, things start a little earlier and wrap up a little earlier; in Pangyo, the office lights are already half off by that hour.

For a foreigner joining a Korean company or arriving on an expat posting, this evening window is the first thing you run into. Work is done, but the day doesn’t quite feel over — that in-between stretch. That stretch is where hoesik (company dinner) lives, with overtime huddled around it on both sides.

This isn’t an article about alcohol. It’s about working hours and workplace culture. Let’s start with the numbers.

Do Koreans really work that much?

Not as much as before, but still a lot. In 2025, Korean workers averaged 1,833 hours a year. That’s 97 hours more than the OECD average of 1,736 hours, and the sixth-longest among the 36 member countries with data.

What matters is the direction. From 2,163 hours in 2010, it fell to 2,082 hours in 2015, then dipped below 2,000 hours (1,992) for the first time in 2018 — the year the 52-hour cap took effect — and has kept falling: 1,872 hours in 2023 → 1,865 hours in 2024 → 1,833 hours in 2025. In 15 years, 330 hours have vanished — the equivalent of 41 eight-hour workdays.

📊 OECD annual working hours compared (2025, per employed person)

The 501-hour gap with Germany means, excluding weekends, 63 extra workdays a year. Same rank, same job — but in Korea you’d effectively be working two more months. That’s what the numbers feel like in real life.

Then why does the office still run late?

Even with the 52-hour cap, two big reasons explain why the lights are still on at 8 p.m.

First, work patterns are rigidly uniform. In Korea, 53.1% of workers are on full-time 40-hour contracts — nothing like Germany (30.9%), the UK (15.9%), or France (12.5%). With part-time and flexible options thin on the ground, when things get busy the only slack is overtime.

Second, the comprehensive wage system (all-inclusive overtime pay). Under this contract, overtime, night, and holiday pay are folded into the monthly salary in advance — and because actual hours are never measured, extra work doesn’t bring extra pay. It’s where the phrase unpaid overtime comes from. The Ministry of Employment and Labor has issued guidelines against its misuse, and an abolition bill is pending in the National Assembly.

What exactly is a hoesik?

A meal the company shares as a unit. The two hanja break down to “to gather” (會) and “to eat” (食). It always comes with a pretext: a team hoesik, a department hoesik, a welcome dinner for new hires, a project wrap-up, a year-end party.

The thing that sets it decisively apart from a Western team dinner is that attendance has long been treated as half work. In surveys, when asked when hoesik happens, 71.4% said after working hours — more than three times the 23.1% who said within them. A gathering held off the clock yet treated as an extension of work: that contradiction is the heart of hoesik.

A traditional hoesik runs in rounds. Stop after the first round and it’s a mild one; go to the third and it’s the old-school kind.

🍚 The rounds of a hoesik — what happens where, and for how long

How often does hoesik happen?

Less often than you’d think. A 2024 survey of 1,000 office workers broke the frequency down like this.

The weekly drinking marathon you see in dramas and films is now a minority experience. Three factors drove the shift.

• The 52-hour cap (2018–2021) — a late dinner suddenly made the next day harder, and the old structure cracked
• COVID-19 (2020–2022) — hoesik were physically impossible for over two years, and people learned they could live without them
• Generational change — what younger workers prefer, in order, is a short hoesik, a lunch hoesik, and an opt-in hoesik

Still, it’s more accurate to say hoesik changed form rather than disappeared. A lunch hoesik over the midday break, a culture hoesik with a show or exhibition instead of alcohol, a foodie hoesik booked at an omakase or wine bar — all on the rise. Some companies even split the hoesik budget and let everyone spend it wherever they like.

What if you don't drink?

Just say you don’t drink. And by current standards, that answer deserves to be respected.

First, know the reality. In a 2024 survey, 23.4% of workers who attend hoesik said they’d been pressured to drink, and of those pressured, 72.9% ended up drinking anyway. Another 20.4% had been pressured to join the post-dinner noraebang. The old culture hasn’t fully disappeared.

At the same time, the legal environment has clearly changed. Article 76-2 of the Labor Standards Act (prohibition of workplace harassment), which took effect on July 16, 2019, bans using rank or relationship to inflict pain beyond the proper scope of work. Courts have recognized the following as harassment:

Drinking etiquette itself isn’t hard. In a workplace context only three things actually matter. Pour with both hands when serving a senior, turn slightly away when drinking in front of a senior, and never fill your own glass. Somaek (soju + beer) shows up constantly at hoesik — it looks weak, but the glasses turn over fast, so the total adds up. If you’ve decided not to drink, say so before the somaek-making starts.

When is it fine to skip — and when should you go?

Hoesik is not legally working time. It has no direct link to your duties and is social and morale-building in nature, so the administrative interpretation is that it doesn’t count as working hours in principle. That means no attendance obligation, and no extra pay if you show up. (That said, if you’re injured at an event the employer organized and controlled, it can be recognized as a workplace accident.)

The practical rule of thumb:

Who pays for the hoesik?

Mostly the company. A team or department head swipes the corporate card; individuals splitting the bill is rare. If a new hire reaches for their wallet, they’re usually told to put it away.

On the books it splits two ways — and the distinction often decides the scale and venue.

💳 How a hoesik is booked — employees only, or clients involved?

Once a single bill passes ₩30,000, you need proper proof such as a tax invoice or corporate-card receipt, and entertainment spending beyond the limit isn’t recognized as an expense. That’s why department hoesik tend to cluster at quarter-end or year-end, timed to the budget cycle.

Where in Seoul do people hoesik?

Hoesik venues are almost entirely dictated by the commercial district around the office. Walk through any neighborhood at dinner time and you can read its industry mix.

🍻 Seoul's main office districts and their hoesik scenes

The interesting bit for a traveler is weekday Euljiro between 7 and 9 p.m. At that hour the alleys aren’t a tourist zone but a fully working, everyday space — people in neckties and people in hoodies sitting on the same plastic chairs. It’s also the cheapest place to observe Korean office culture.

There’s daytime hoesik too — lunch and coffee

Lunch at a Korean company is usually one hour, from noon to 1 p.m., and for a long time going out as a team was the default. The menu is usually picked by the most senior person, who pays — or the team card does. Then it’s coffee from a nearby café on the way back to the office; the whole loop is one set.

That structure is shaking too. Younger workers say they don’t want to spend their only real break of the day with work people, and more of them now choose to eat alone or grab a sandwich at a café. Coffee costs have also become a burden, and the shift to budget coffee brands is unmistakable.

Two practical rules for foreign employees. First, in your first few months, it’s better to tag along to team lunches. They’re far lighter than hoesik but build relationships about as well. Second, payment usually rotates. If you’ve been treated a few times, offering to put your card down first once is natural.

Can you take annual leave whenever you want?

Legally, yes — and in practice it’s far better than it used to be. Under the Labor Standards Act, a year of continuous service earns you 15 days of paid leave, growing with seniority. The timing is, in principle, the worker’s call.

The numbers look fine on paper, but the 3.5 days left over measure the size of nunchi (reading the room). The word is hard to translate. It describes a state where nobody has forbidden something, yet the atmosphere makes it hard to do. If the team lead doesn’t take leave, the team finds it hard to; and leave hoarded for year-end often ends up never taken.

Some things are changing. Leave once clustered in August is now spreading into February–June and October/December, and the government is pushing legislation to ban treating leave-taking as grounds for disadvantage. Remote work remains limited in spread, stuck at a single-digit share of total employment.

What Korea is fighting over right now on working hours

As of 2026, the working-hours system is being pulled in both directions at once. It’s hard to say either side has won, so both arguments are recorded here.

The deregulation side argues the 52-hour cap hobbles advanced industries like semiconductors and AI, along with R&D and startups. If you can’t work intensively when a dev deadline looms, the logic goes, you can’t keep up with competitor countries — and industry ministries have been demanding special-law exemptions.

The keep-the-rules side counters that long hours first need to be proven to translate into actual productivity. They point out that major semiconductor firms posted record results even without 52-hour exceptions, and warn that one exception will spread across the whole economy.

The government’s official target is cutting actual annual working hours to the 1,700 range by 2030, and it’s pursuing a 4.5-day-workweek pilot and legislation to support shorter actual hours. Whichever way it resolves, the hoesik timetable will most likely follow the result. Shorter work has meant shorter hoesik — that’s the pattern of the past eight years.