Civil servants to be paid for all overtime worked as daily cap scrapped

Civil servants will be compensated for every hour of overtime they work, with the government set to scrap a daily cap that previously limited recognized overtime to four hours.

The Ministry of Personnel Management and the Ministry of Interior and Safety announced Tuesday that they would pre-announce legislative amendments to rationalize how overtime allowances are paid to civil servants.

Under the proposed changes, the four-hour daily ceiling will be abolished on the grounds that it does not reflect actual working conditions, allowing civil servants to be compensated for all overtime hours worked.

Under the current system, even if a civil servant works more than four hours of overtime on a particularly busy day, only four hours are recognized for pay purposes.

However, the monthly cap of 57 hours will be retained to keep total overtime within a reasonable range while protecting workers' right to rest.

A separate provision that allowed the monthly cap to be raised to 100 hours in exceptional circumstances — such as urgent policy responses — with prior approval from the relevant minister will also be eliminated. Approval authority for such exceptions will be delegated downward from agency heads to director-general-level officials.

The government said it took into account situations in which more than 100 hours of monthly overtime had become unavoidable, citing the need to respond to the ongoing war in the Middle East as one example.

The government will also introduce a new "overtime compensation allowance" for Grade 4 civil servants in dual-role positions who do not serve as department heads.

Such officials have until now been ineligible for overtime pay because they receive a management duties allowance. The new allowance recognizes that many of them handle frontline work in addition to managerial responsibilities before being promoted to section chief.

However, given that they already receive a management duties allowance, the additional payment will apply only when a designated recipient — pre-approved by the relevant minister — logs more than 25 hours of overtime in a given month, with only the hours exceeding that threshold compensated.

The government will also tighten oversight to stamp out the practice of logging overtime that was not actually worked.

The electronic personnel management system will be upgraded to allow verification of actual overtime, with a pilot period before the system is rolled out to all civil servants.

Under the new system, employees will log their overtime status at set intervals, and department heads will confirm whether the work was actually performed.

The overtime volume management function currently applied to national-level civil servants will also be extended to the electronic personnel management system used by local government employees. Local governments that set reasonable overtime ceilings and manage attendance accordingly will receive administrative and fiscal incentives.

Penalties for fraudulent claims will also be tightened. Currently, disciplinary proceedings are mandatory only for those who have filed fraudulent claims on two or more occasions. Under the revised rules, a single fraudulent claim of 500,000 won ($337) or more will trigger mandatory disciplinary proceedings.

The amendments also include follow-up measures to strengthen professional expertise in the civil service, including adding associate specialist officials as eligible recipients of professional duty allowances in line with a revision to the personnel regulations for specialist civil servants promulgated last month.

"The revision is intended to ensure fair compensation for hours actually worked," Ministry of Personnel Management Minister Choe Dong-seok said. "As we make compensation more realistic, we will also strengthen oversight of fraudulent claims."