Court: “Performance pay received at the end of a fixed-term teacher contract must be reflected in severance pay.”

“Performance bonus is compensation for working before retirement”, citing claim from a part-time teacher

(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Lee Mi-ryeong = A court ruled that the performance bonus paid to a part-time teacher after the end of the contract should be reflected in the severance pay as it is ‘compensation for work before retirement’.

On the 12th, Chief Judge Lee Kun-bae of the Seoul Central District Court's Civil Division 1003 ruled in a lawsuit claiming severance pay filed by Mr. A, who worked as a part-time teacher at a public high school in Seoul, against the Seoul Metropolitan Government and the Republic of Korea, saying, "Seoul City must pay 350,275 won and delay damages to the plaintiff."

Mr. A retired after working at different schools from March 2022 to February 2024 and from March 2024 to February 2025, and filed a lawsuit claiming that the performance bonus was not reflected in his severance pay.

The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education's 'Public School Contract Teacher Management Guidelines' requires that only the amount actually received during the three months prior to retirement be included in the calculation of severance pay.

For part-time teachers, most contracts end at the end of February, when the school year ends.

The problem is that teacher performance bonuses are evaluated for work from March to February of the following year and are paid at the end of March of that year.

In the end, due to this performance bonus payment structure, in the case of fixed-term teachers, the performance bonus was often not reflected in the severance pay because the performance bonus was received after the contract ended.

Accordingly, in the lawsuit filed by Mr. A requesting that his performance bonus be reflected in his severance pay, the court ruled in Mr. A's favor.

The court ruled in favor of Mr. A, saying, “Even if the performance bonus is inevitably paid after retirement due to the process of evaluating performance and determining the grade, it is clear that it corresponds to wages for the working period before retirement.”

However, the court did not accept the request for alimony because it judged that it was difficult to view the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education officials as negligent under the National Compensation Act, citing the fact that "there were no explicit regulations or established precedents."

Lawyers Park Eun-seon and Kim Na-eun (Eui Law Office), who were in charge of the case, explained, "The court made it clear that performance bonuses should not be deducted from severance pay just because they are received late. It was confirmed that the rights of part-time teachers were not created by a new Supreme Court ruling or a change in the Office of Education's policy, but 'they existed from the beginning.'"