Italy Closes for the Summer. South Korea Never Really Opens the Door.

🇮🇹 Italy · 🇰🇷 South Korea

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Italy, an employee who has not scheduled four weeks off by June is treated with the same concern reserved for someone who has not seen a doctor in a decade. In South Korea, an employee who schedules four consecutive weeks off is treated with the same concern reserved for someone who has just resigned, quietly, without telling anyone. Both countries grant their workers a similar number of statutory days on paper. What happens to those days afterward — whether they are spent, ignored, apologized for, or spent by an entire nation on the same sixteen days in August — is where the similarity ends and the anthropology begins.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇹 Italy

🇰🇷 South Korea

Italy

According to OECD figures aggregated from national labor statistics, Italian workers are entitled to roughly 20 statutory paid vacation days a year plus 10 public holidays — a baseline that many collective bargaining agreements push higher still. The number that matters more than the entitlement, though, is the one describing what happens to the country every August. The Local Italy reports that the "chiusura estiva" (summer closure) typically runs two to four weeks centered on Ferragosto, the August 15 holiday, during which banks, post offices, tax offices, and a large share of private businesses either close outright or reduce to skeleton staffing. A recent regional survey found roughly half of commercial businesses outside tourist zones planning closures during peak August weeks, with manufacturing plants often shutting for two to three full weeks.

The scale of the shutdown has shrunk since its mid-century peak — one hoteliers' association estimates only 41% of Italians will take their longest annual vacation in August now, down from more than two-thirds a generation ago — but the institutional memory has not caught up. Try scheduling a contract signature, a permit renewal, or a client call in the second half of August, and you will be met with a shrug that has been passed down since the Roman Feriae Augusti, the original imperial excuse for August idleness. Gallup World Poll data puts Italian workplace wellbeing satisfaction at 57%, comfortably ahead of the regional average, which suggests the shrug is doing something right.

South Korea

South Korea's statutory floor looks almost identical to Italy's at first glance — 15 days after one year of service, rising with tenure, per national labor law. The practice diverges sharply from there. Historical Expedia vacation-deprivation data once ranked Korea as the world's least likely country to actually use its allotted leave, with workers taking roughly 7 of their 15 days; more recent industry surveys show real improvement, with 53.3% of Korean employees now reporting they use their full allotment, a rate that trails only Singapore regionally. The OECD still records South Korea's average annual working hours at 2,124 — second only to Mexico among member countries, and 354 hours above the OECD average.

The mechanism behind the gap is not the law but the room. Korean workplace culture, built around visible group commitment, treats a long, unbroken absence as a quiet signal of disengagement rather than a right being exercised. Employers are legally required to notify staff of unused days six months before year-end forfeiture and to encourage them in writing to schedule the remainder — a compliance ritual that exists precisely because voluntary uptake could not be relied upon. Foreign employees, notably, often report an easier time of it than their Korean colleagues, since the cultural expectations attached to visible sacrifice apply more loosely to people who were never expected to internalize them in the first place.

The Reckoning

Put the two countries' statutory entitlements side by side and the difference looks modest — Italy's 20 days plus 10 holidays against South Korea's 15 days plus roughly 15 to 16 holidays, totaling close to 30 days apiece once everything is counted, per OECD-adjacent tallies. Hofstede Insights' cultural-dimension data offers the more useful lens: Italy scores firmly individualist while South Korea scores among the most collectivist and long-term-oriented societies measured, and that single axis explains more about actual leave-taking than any statute does. Individualist cultures treat vacation as a personal entitlement to be exercised without apology. Collectivist ones treat it as a resource to be allocated carefully against the group's ongoing judgment of your commitment.

The counterintuitive part is which country makes it easier to be a newcomer. Italy's system is generous and rigid — everyone leaves at the same time, whether the calendar suits you or not, and an expat who ignores the August closure will simply find nothing open. South Korea's system is comparatively flexible and psychologically taxing — the days exist, the law protects them, but exercising them requires reading a room that took Korean colleagues a lifetime to learn, and getting it wrong costs reputation rather than pay.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — One respondent recalled arriving in Italy expecting the "everyone takes two months off" stereotype to be an exaggeration, only to discover that while most workers actually take one to two weeks, the entire surrounding infrastructure — banks, permit offices, even some pharmacies on rotation — behaves as if the whole country vanished, which functionally amounts to the same disruption.

Quora — A commenter answering a question about Korean vacation habits described colleagues who technically had two unused weeks left every December, not because they loved the office, but because nobody wanted to be the one name on the year-end leave report standing out from the pack.

TeamBlind — A poster discussing work-life balance at a major Seoul tech employer described chronic late-night hours as the real obstacle to leave, noting that even approved vacation days got quietly interrupted by messages that assumed availability regardless of calendar status.

Hacker News — A commenter on a thread about Korea's shifting work culture noted that foreign hires were often surprised how much more slack they were cut around time off compared to Korean-national colleagues, describing it as a strange, unearned privilege that came with its own discomfort.

Quora — Someone answering a question on Italian vacation norms advised future arrivals to stop treating the August closure as a scheduling inconvenience and start treating it as a fixed feature of the calendar, on the theory that fighting Ferragosto is a losing negotiation with several thousand years of precedent.

Conclusion

The practical advice is almost embarrassingly simple, given how much cultural weight sits on top of it. In Italy, block out your calendar around Ferragosto before you do anything else, use every day you are owed without narrating the decision, and accept that late August is not a time zone anyone can reach you in. In South Korea, treat the statutory 15 days as a genuine floor, give the long notice the culture expects, and lean gently on the unofficial expat exemption without becoming the person who tests its limits weekly.

Both systems, in their own way, are honest about what they value: Italy about the sanctity of collective rest, South Korea about the sanctity of collective presence. Neither brochure will tell you which one will make you happier — only that you will need considerably less courage to take your vacation in the country that shuts down without asking permission.