Korea’s 2027 minimum wage is ₩10,700 an hour — about ₩2,236,300 a month for full-time work, up 3.7% from this year, effective January 1, 2027. That number applies to migrant and international student workers too, on paper. What almost changed in June, and what two little-known payroll rules actually mean for them, is a very different story.
A few weeks back I wrote about my own payslip shrinking after a raise — the usual four-insurance math that eats a chunk of any Korean paycheck. A reader replied with a sharper question than mine: does any of this work the same way for someone here on an E-9 visa, or a student working nights at a convenience store? I answered fast, and wrong. I said the standard “90% for the first three months” discount probably still applied to them, the way it technically could apply to me. It doesn’t, for most migrant labor jobs, and I only found that out digging into this year’s minimum wage news properly.
What Is Korea’s 2027 Minimum Wage, Exactly?
On July 14, 2026, the Minimum Wage Commission (최저임금위원회, Choejeoimgeum Wiwonhoe — the tripartite labor-business-public panel that sets the floor every year) voted 17 to 11 for the employer side’s proposed rate of ₩10,700, beating out labor’s competing bid of ₩10,730 by a razor-thin ₩30. That is a 3.7% increase over 2026’s ₩10,320, and it comes out to ₩2,236,300 a month using the standard 209-hour formula (a 40-hour week plus one paid weekly rest day). Run the same 209-hour math on this year’s ₩10,320 and you get ₩2,156,880 — so the actual monthly gain for a full-time worker is ₩79,420, not the vaguer “3.7% more” headline. It takes effect nationwide on January 1, 2027, and the Ministry of Employment and Labor has been explicit that it applies “without distinction by type of business” — every industry, one number.
What that framing leaves out is nationality, immigration status, and student visa hour limits. The wire coverage stops there. This piece doesn’t.
Was There Really a Vote to Pay Foreign Workers Less?
Yes, and it happened a month before the headline number did, which is probably why almost no English outlet noticed. On June 18, 2026, the same Commission voted on a business-side proposal to set a lower, sector-specific minimum wage for lodging and food-service industries — the sectors where migrant and foreign labor concentrate most heavily in Korea. It failed, 11 to 14, with one invalid ballot.
Here’s the part that didn’t make it into any of the wire stories I found: labor’s representatives on the panel said, publicly and on the record, that a sector carve-out like this would function as a legal workaround — a way to justify paying foreign, probationary, and disabled workers less without ever writing “nationality” into a wage table. You can’t legally set a lower minimum wage by immigration status in Korea. You can, in theory, set one by industry code, and then staff that industry almost entirely with the workers you wanted to pay less. The proposal lost by three votes. It’s worth remembering it was on the table at all.
Does the 90% Probation Discount Apply to Migrant Workers?
For most factory, farm, and fishery jobs — no, and this is where I gave a reader the wrong answer. Article 5, Clause 2 of the Minimum Wage Act (최저임금법 제5조제2항) lets employers pay 90% of the minimum wage during a new hire’s first three months, but only on contracts of a year or longer. A 2018 amendment carved out an exception: that discount is void for jobs classified under Major Group 9 of the Korean Standard Classification of Occupations — 단순노무종사원 (dansun-nomu-jongsawon, “simple labor workers”) — which is exactly the occupational category covering most jobs held by workers on an E-9 visa (비전문취업, bijeonmun-chwieop, “non-professional employment,” Korea’s main visa for migrant factory, farm, and fishing-industry labor).
Do the math on what that carve-out is actually worth. A discounted “probation wage” at 90% of ₩2,236,300 comes to ₩2,012,670 a month. The legal floor for most E-9 jobs is the full ₩2,236,300 from day one. That’s a ₩223,630 monthly gap between what an employer might assume they can pay and what the law actually allows — and I’d guess more than a few employers are still assuming the old, simpler rule. It’s also a gap the Mercans compliance alert I read while researching this got wrong: it flags the 90%-probation exception as a general employer note without mentioning the 2018 carve-out at all, which is exactly the kind of “technically true, practically misleading” gap this piece exists to close.
Do Student Workers Get the Same Raise?
Same wage floor, much lower ceiling — and the ceiling, not the rate, is what actually controls most students’ paychecks. Workers on a D-4 visa (일반연수, ilban-yeonsu, “general training,” Korea’s language-institute student visa) are capped in tiers of 10, 20, or 25 hours a week depending on their Korean level and program stage. Take the top tier: 25 hours a week at ₩10,700 comes to roughly ₩267,500 a week, or about ₩1,159,750 a month — up from roughly ₩1,118,000 doing the same math at 2026’s rate, a gain of about ₩41,700. Compare that to the ₩2,236,300 a full-time worker gets and the shape of the problem is obvious: the raise helps, but the hour cap was already the bigger constraint.
Students on a D-2 visa (유학, yuhak, “overseas study,” the standard university student visa) have no weekly hour cap at all — but only during vacations and weekends, and only within their approved field of study. A D-2 student working full-time hours over summer break gets the same ₩2,236,300 floor as anyone else; the same student working during the semester is bound by the same tiered caps as D-4 holders. And since February 2026, TOPIK (한국어능력시험, Hangugeo Neungnyeok Siheom, “Test of Proficiency in Korean”) level 3+ students in 16 government-designated technology programs got a separate carve-out: their weekly ceiling rose from 30 hours to 35 hours, worth roughly ₩1,622,830 a month at the new rate versus about ₩1,391,000 under the old 30-hour cap at the same rate — a policy change worth more to them than the wage hike itself.
My commute runs about 33 minutes on the same subway line every weekday morning, past a stretch of phone shops and immigration paperwork offices that mostly serve international students and E-9 workers on early shifts. I’ve walked past that block for two years without once wondering what their actual hour caps were. I do now.
What Actually Changes on a Migrant or Student Worker’s Payslip?
For most people covered by this raise, the change is simple: the hourly number on the payslip goes from ₩10,320 to ₩10,700, and the monthly total moves accordingly, no differently than it would for a Korean coworker. The Ministry’s own impact estimates put the scale of that group somewhere between 660,000 workers (a 3.8% impact rate) and 2.978 million workers (13.3%), depending on how directly-affected is measured — a wide enough range that it’s worth treating both numbers as “a lot of people,” not a precise headcount.
The table below is the breakdown I wish I’d had when I answered that reader’s question.
| Worker type | 2027 monthly floor/ceiling (₩10,700) | 2026 equivalent (₩10,320) | What actually applies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full-time E-9 migrant worker (209 hrs) | ₩2,236,300 | ₩2,156,880 | No legal probation discount — KSCO Major Group 9 |
| Migrant worker, “90% probation” wrongly applied | ₩2,012,670 (would-be, illegal) | — | Void since the 2018 amendment for most migrant jobs |
| D-4 language student (25 hrs/week cap) | ≈₩1,159,750 | ≈₩1,118,000 | Capped by hours, not rate |
| D-2 university student, approved full-time break work (209 hrs) | ₩2,236,300 | ₩2,156,880 | Only outside term-time, within approved field |
If you’re on an E-9 contract and your first payslip in January still shows something close to ₩2,012,670 instead of ₩2,236,300, that’s not a rounding issue — ask HR to point to the specific exception they think applies, because for simple-labor occupations, there usually isn’t one anymore.
Is the ₩10,700 Rate Locked In, or Could It Still Change?
As of this month, it’s locked. The Ministry of Employment and Labor issued its final gazette notice on August 5, 2026, confirming ₩10,700 and rejecting two formal objections filed during the review period — one from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, arguing the wage floor should extend to gig and platform workers, and one from the Korea Federation of Micro Enterprise, arguing the increase was too steep for small business owners to absorb. The ministry’s own line was that it “comprehensively considered the purpose and content of the Minimum Wage Act along with the Commission’s deliberation and resolution process” — bureaucratic phrasing for “no.” Worth noting: no objection has been accepted at this stage since Korea’s minimum wage system began in 1988.
There’s one thread still open. The Korea Federation of Micro Enterprise has said it plans to file an administrative lawsuit at Seoul Administrative Court challenging the notice. Given the track record above, I wouldn’t bet on that changing your January payslip, and neither, in practice, would the ministry — it’s already told employers to prepare compliance guidance for the new rate. Treat ₩10,700 as final, not provisional.
If you’re a migrant worker on a one-year-plus contract and someone tells you a “training wage” applies in your first three months, this is the article to hand them — Article 5(2) has an exception with your job title’s name on it. If you’re a language-track student doing the math on next semester’s part-time hours, the rate helps a little; the tier you’re capped at still decides more of your paycheck than the raise does. ⚠️ This isn’t legal advice — if your actual payslip doesn’t match what’s described here, the Ministry’s foreign worker hotline (1350, English service available) and your local Labor Welfare Corporation office are the real channel to sort it out, not a blog post.