The Art of Not Working: Germany Takes Leave, South Korea Takes Note

🇩🇪 Germany · 🇰🇷 South Korea

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Germans are legally entitled to a minimum of 20 days of paid annual leave, receive an average of 28 days in practice, and are protected by a court ruling that requires employers to actively notify workers before they can lose their unused days. South Koreans are legally entitled to 15 days after one year of service, receive that entitlement in theory, and take, on average, 8. These two countries have, in other words, arrived at very different conclusions about what the phrase "time off" is for.

Do's & Don'ts

🇩🇪 Germany

🇰🇷 South Korea

Germany

German vacation law — governed principally by the Bundesurlaubsgesetz, the Federal Leave Act — operates on the premise that the right to rest is not a workplace benefit but a legal entitlement that cannot be contracted away or socially pressured out of existence. The statutory minimum is 20 days per year for a standard five-day week; in practice, collective bargaining agreements push the average to 28 days, with sectors including energy, finance, and public administration averaging 30 (Destatis, 2024).

The Federal Labour Court has further reinforced this framework with a significant ruling that made international headlines in 2022: employers cannot allow employees to forfeit unused vacation days at year's end unless they have actively notified workers of their remaining leave and encouraged them to take it. A tax clerk who left her law firm job after 21 years was later awarded over €17,000 in compensation for unused leave her employer had never prompted her to take. The law, in other words, protects Germans not just from being denied leave but from forgetting to take it.

The cultural attitude reinforces the legal structure. German managers do not look favourably on workers who decline to take their leave; doing so suggests either poor planning or an implied criticism of those who take theirs. The separation between work time and rest time is a feature of German industrial culture that predates the welfare state and has survived multiple economic transformations. Leave in Germany is also taken in extended blocks. The Sommerurlaub — the summer holiday — of two to four weeks is not an anachronism but a contemporary norm, with out-of-office messages sometimes set with the explicit instruction not to forward messages, and a promise to catch up upon return. This last practice has generated considerable international commentary, mostly from people who could not quite believe it was real. It is real.

South Korea

South Korea's leave entitlement is, on paper, reasonable. Under the Labor Standards Act, employees who have worked for more than one year are entitled to 15 days of paid annual leave, increasing by one additional day for every two years of service, up to a maximum of 25 days. Companies with more than five employees are required to comply.

The gap between entitlement and practice is remarkable. An Expedia Vacation Deprivation survey found South Korean workers take an average of eight days out of their 15 allotted — a usage rate of approximately 53%, among the lowest of the 28 countries surveyed. The structural reasons are well-documented: face-time culture means that physical presence in the office signals commitment; hierarchical norms mean that junior employees are reluctant to take leave before senior staff; and the after-work social culture — hweshik dinners, company group activities — extends professional time beyond contracted hours in ways that further erode the boundary between work and non-work.

A 2011 Korea Times survey — whose findings have proven stubbornly durable — found that 35% of Korean workers said they feel guilty about taking a long holiday because of their peers; 20% said they simply cannot, because their bosses do not take long holidays; and 16% worried a vacation would negatively influence their performance evaluation. One office worker captured the logic precisely: "When I take a long vacation, I feel uneasy and worried about work that I haven't finished. And you feel obliged to show you're a hard worker who doesn't go on a long vacation." The Korean government has, for several years, attempted to reverse this dynamic through incentive programmes that pay workers bonuses to take their leave. The measures have had limited effect. Culture, it turns out, is more resistant than legislation.

The Reckoning

The German example suggests that adequate leave is achievable without destroying economic competitiveness — Germany has one of the most productive workforces in the world by output per hour worked, and it gets there by working fewer hours more intensely rather than many hours at diminishing returns. The South Korean example suggests that legislated entitlement is a necessary but not sufficient condition for workers to actually take it. Having a right that social culture prevents you from exercising is, in practical terms, not quite a right.

Expats note the adjustment in both directions. A Korean engineer who relocated to Munich described his first Sommerurlaub as "three weeks of low-grade anxiety followed by genuine recovery." A German professional who spent a year in Seoul reported checking emails during his vacation for the first time in his working life, not because his Seoul employer asked him to, but because the culture made not doing so feel irresponsible. Two people, two different understandings of what a holiday is allowed to be.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

The Local Germany — A 2022 European Court of Justice ruling, based on a case in Germany, confirmed that unused holiday entitlement does not expire if the employer never informed the employee of the deadline. One woman recouped compensation for 101 days of leave accumulated across 21 years. Her employer's defence was that she hadn't asked. The court's response was, essentially: you should have told her to.

Kowork.kr (foreigners working in Korea) — Korea's annual leave system mandates 15 days after one year. But paid sick leave is not required by law in most cases, and many employees use annual leave to cover illness. The result: your holiday days quietly double as your sick days, and neither count as either.

Korea Times survey — About 35% of Korean workers say they feel guilty taking a long holiday because colleagues have to cover for them. A research professor who published a book on the subject titled it "The Lost 10 Days." He described long vacations as being seen as "a sin" in Korean workplace culture. The book has not, as yet, become mandatory reading for HR departments.

Quora, on German vacation policy — "In Germany, your manager will actually ask you when you're taking your summer holiday, not whether you're taking it. I moved from the US and the first time it happened I genuinely didn't know how to answer."

Reddit, r/expats — An Australian who moved to Seoul noted: "I have 15 days. I've taken 4 in 8 months. Not because I don't want to — because taking a full week feels like I'm announcing that I don't care about the team. I've started using half-days [반차] just to feel human again."

Conclusion

Germany has built a legal architecture around the right to rest that is strong enough to survive culture. South Korea has built a culture around the obligation to work that is strong enough to survive law. Both systems are internally coherent; the outcomes they produce for the people inside them are not equally kind.

The question of which is easier to change — laws or culture — has a reasonably clear historical answer, and it does not favour the country that is currently paying its workers to go on holiday and finding that they mostly don't. Perhaps the more useful question is whether the workers themselves want it to change — and in South Korea, increasingly, the younger ones do. They have simply not yet figured out how to want it loudly enough for their bosses to hear.