To curb long working hours, Korea introduced a cap on how many hours you can work per week. What's the limit?

Korea's workweek cap is fifty-two hours, made up of forty regular hours plus up to twelve hours of overtime, introduced to curb the country's historically long working hours, and phased in gradually by company size so smaller businesses had more time to adjust. Overtime beyond the regular forty hours must be compensated at a premium rate, typically one-and-a-half times the ordinary hourly wage.

Seventy-two hours would far exceed the legal cap and reflects an older, pre-reform reality rather than current law, and 'no limit' simply ignores that the fifty-two-hour cap is a specific, enforced legal ceiling rather than an open-ended arrangement.

Whether certain activities — like mandatory company dinners or being on standby without formally clocking in — count toward the fifty-two-hour total is a genuinely contested gray area, which is why workers are encouraged to check their contract and internal work rules rather than assume every hour spent 'for work' is automatically counted.