The Ministry of Employment and Labor on Tuesday released its “2025 Status of Mandatory Disability Employment.” The system requires the state and local governments and 33,452 workplaces with 50 or more regular employees to hire people with disabilities. The current mandatory rates are 3.8% for the public sector and 3.1% for the private sector.
Last year, the overall disability employment rate averaged 3.27%, up 0.06 percentage points from a year earlier. The number of employees with disabilities rose to 309,846, an increase of 11,192 from 2024.
The disability employment rate was 3.94% in the public sector, including the government and public institutions, and 3.10% in private companies, up 0.04 and 0.07 percentage points, respectively. Most of the increase — 9,507 people — came from private companies. The ministry said the private sector met its mandatory hiring rate for the first time since the system took effect in 1991.
Among companies with 1,000 or more employees, the disability employment rate rose 0.09 percentage points from the previous year. The ministry said disability hiring is increasingly becoming a key management consideration, especially at large firms.
The makeup of the workforce is also changing. The shares of workers with severe disabilities and women with disabilities continued to rise, reaching 37.5% and 29.3%, respectively. The share of intellectual, autism and mental disabilities rose to 23.1%, topping 20% for the first time.
Still, disability employment rates were low among civil servants and companies with fewer than 100 employees, at 2.85% and 2.13%, respectively. Civil service rates fell short of the legal requirement across central administrative agencies (3.53%), local governments (3.64%), constitutional institutions (2.86%) and education offices (1.91%). Among private companies with fewer than 100 employees, the rate rose 0.08 percentage points from a year earlier but remained low.
The government said it will closely review disability employment in the civil service and actively seek ways to expand hiring, including integrated consulting and identifying suitable job roles. To encourage compliance in the private sector, it is providing employment improvement incentives to companies with 50 to 99 employees when they newly hire people with severe disabilities. It also said it will strengthen the effectiveness of levies on companies that repeatedly and deliberately evade their hiring obligations.
Labor Minister Kim Young-hoon said, “Private companies meeting the mandatory hiring rate means disability employment is beginning to take hold as a universal standard in the labor market.” He added, “We will continue efforts to secure both quantitative and qualitative diversity in employment so that workers such as women with severe disabilities and those with mental disabilities can work in stable jobs.”
* This article has been translated by AI.
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