85% of Korean Office Workers Report Job Stress, and 7 in 10 Say They’ve Experienced Burnout

New survey data on Korean workplace wellbeing paints a sobering picture: roughly 85% of Korean office workers report experiencing job-related stress, and approximately 70% say they have personally experienced burnout — physical and mental exhaustion severe enough to interfere with normal functioning — according to workplace mental health research circulating in Korean media this year.

The scale of the reported burnout figures has prompted comparisons to workplace mental health crises documented in other countries with historically demanding work cultures, with some Korean commentary explicitly framing the data as a warning sign that Korea may be approaching, or has already reached, a level of workplace stress requiring more structural intervention than individual coping strategies alone can address.

Separate data cited in the same wave of workplace-wellbeing coverage found that meeting overload — excessive, poorly structured, or unnecessarily frequent meetings — has been specifically documented as a major burnout driver, with constant task-switching between meetings and actual work identified as particularly damaging to sustained focus and mental recovery time during the workday.

Financial stress compounds the picture: roughly 23% of surveyed workers cited personal finances as a top source of workplace stress, and 62% reported cutting spending due to financial worry, suggesting that job-related and financial-related stress sources are overlapping and reinforcing each other for a substantial share of Korea’s working population rather than representing entirely separate concerns.

The consistency of these findings across multiple independent surveys has added weight to ongoing conversations within Korean labor and corporate policy circles about whether current workplace mental health support structures are adequately scaled to the apparent breadth of the problem, though concrete large-scale policy or corporate-practice responses remain in relatively early stages.

Source: Korean workplace mental health and burnout survey data, 2026.