Typhoon Days in Taiwan: What Foreign Employers Must Pay When the Government Closes Offices

In this guide

On the evening of Thursday, July 9, 2026, nine Taiwanese city and county chiefs announced that offices and schools would close the following day. By Friday night, 20 of Taiwan's 22 local jurisdictions had done the same for Saturday as Typhoon Bavi approached.¹²

If you run a Taiwan team from a head office in the United Kingdom, the United States, or Singapore, the question that reaches you the next morning is usually some version of "so is today a public holiday, and do we pay?"

However, both questions are starting from the wrong premise.

A Taiwanese government work suspension does not legally close a private company. The Regulations for Suspension of Work and Classes Due to Natural Disasters cover government agencies and public and private schools, and Article 18 states that suspension of work at private enterprises is handled under the Labor Standards Act and by negotiation between employer and employees.³ There is no statutory paid typhoon day. What binds you is a short set of Ministry of Labor guidelines, your employment contracts, and your work rules.

This guide covers the Taiwan typhoon day pay obligations that actually apply: what those three sources require, what they only recommend, and where the line moved in September 2025.

1. Who the Suspension Order Actually Binds

Taiwan averages 3.2 typhoons a year on a 30-year basis, and roughly 70% of the western North Pacific's storms form between July and October.⁴ This is a recurring payroll event, not an anomaly, which is why the decision rules are written down in detail.

The scope clause most foreign employers never read

Article 1 of the Regulations sets their purpose as giving government agencies and public and private schools a basis for suspending work and classes. Article 2 confirms the scope in the same terms, carving out staff on shift rotation, disaster-response duty, or other special roles who are assigned to report as normal.³

Article 18 then handles everyone else in two lines. Public enterprises and other bodies of special character apply the Regulations by analogy. Private enterprises are directed to the Labor Standards Act and to negotiation between labor and management.³

Who announces, on what trigger, and by when

The decision sits with the mayor of a special municipality or the magistrate of a county or city, who may delegate it to district or township chiefs.³ That is why suspensions arrive jurisdiction by jurisdiction rather than nationally, and why a Taipei team and a Hsinchu team can be on different footing in the same storm.

The wind and rain triggers are specific. A suspension may be announced when forecasts show a typhoon's storm radius passing within four hours with average wind force reaching level 7 or gusts reaching level 10, or when forecast 24-hour rainfall reaches the published threshold for that jurisdiction and damage has occurred or is likely.³ The annex table to Article 4 sets those thresholds jurisdiction by jurisdiction, at 350mm for lowland areas and 200mm for mountain areas in most counties, with Keelung on a single 200mm figure regardless of terrain.³

The timing rules are what your on-call rota should be built around.

A head office that only checks Taiwanese news at the start of its own working day will routinely be eight to twelve hours behind its own employees.

2. What the Ministry of Labor Requires, and What It Only Suggests

The operative document for private employers is the Key Points for Attendance Management and Wage Payment for Workers of Enterprises During Natural Disasters, first issued in June 2009 and amended by the Ministry of Labor on September 19, 2025.⁵

What the guidelines mandate

Point 6 lists three situations: the worker's workplace is in a jurisdiction that announced suspension; the workplace was not covered but typhoon, flood, or earthquake conditions blocked the commute; or the workplace was not covered but the worker's home area or a necessary part of their normal commute route was.⁵

In any of the three, the employer must not treat the day as absence or lateness, force the worker to take personal leave or another leave type, force make-up work, withhold the full-attendance bonus, dismiss, or impose any other adverse measure.⁵

Point 4 adds a step almost nobody imports into a Taiwan playbook. Where your business needs specific workers on duty during a natural disaster, that has to be agreed in advance between the parties, and it requires union consent, or approval by a labor-management conference where there is no union.⁵ Deciding on the night that your support desk is essential does not satisfy this.

Point 5 requires the employer or site manager to take immediate measures to protect worker safety where continuing work at the site would be dangerous.⁵

What the guidelines only advise

Point 7 is the wage rule, and it is the softest sentence in the document. Where a worker cannot attend for one of the Point 6 reasons, the employer should not deduct wages. If the worker attends at the employer's request, the employer pays the day's wage as normal and should pay additional wages.⁵

Point 9 closes the loop honestly. Where a business fails to follow the guidelines and thereby breaches labor law, the penalty comes from whichever law was actually broken.⁵ The guidelines themselves carry no fine.

3. Why "Not Legally Required" Is the Wrong Answer to Give Your Team

A typhoon day is not a public holiday under the Labor Standards Act, and Taiwan has no statutory disaster pay. On a strict reading of the statute alone, a monthly-paid employee who did not work has no claim to that day's wage.

Point 3 is where that reading falls apart.

It requires attendance management, commuting assistance, and wage payment during natural disasters to be settled in advance in the employment contract, the collective agreement, or the work rules, with the guidelines applying only where nothing has been agreed.⁵ Where a Taiwanese employer has settled it, it is usually settled in favor of payment, which is why an incoming foreign employer inherits the expectation whether or not it inherits the clause.

The moment it is written down, or paid consistently enough to become established practice, it stops being discretionary. Withholding it is then a shortfall against contractual wages, and Article 22 requires wages to be paid in full and directly to the worker. Article 79 sets the fine for that class of violation at TWD 20,000 to TWD 1,000,000, and the competent authority may add up to 50% above the maximum depending on company size and the number of workers affected.⁶

Taiwan's 2026 monthly minimum wage is TWD 29,500, raised from TWD 28,590 on January 1 and reaching roughly 2.47 million workers.⁷ Against a fine ceiling in seven figures, one paid storm day is not the expensive line item in this decision.

The practical answer is to write the rule down before the season, not to litigate it during a warning. Our Taiwan employment guide covers the wider contract and work-rules framework this clause sits inside.

Have our Taiwan team review your clause

4. If You Ask Someone to Come In: the Four Pay Scenarios

Attendance on a suspension day is not automatically overtime. Taipei's Labor Inspection Office is direct about it: labor law contains no provision for a typhoon holiday, so whether extra pay applies is a matter for the parties, with the Ministry recommending an additional payment rather than mandating an overtime rate.⁸

What changes the answer is which kind of day the storm lands on.

Note: Statutory rates and calculations reflect the Labor Standards Act as of August 2026 and are subject to amendment. Verify current requirements with the Ministry of Labor or your legal counsel before setting policy.

The last row is the one that produces inspection findings, and it is wider than it looks. Article 40 lets an employer suspend the leave provided under Articles 36 to 38 where an act of catastrophe or unexpected event requires work to continue, and Article 36 covers rest days as well as regular days off.¹⁰ Compelling rest-day attendance during a typhoon therefore sits inside Article 40 rather than the Article 24 ladder above it. Of the three conditions Article 40 attaches, the 24-hour filing is the one foreign employers most often miss, because no equivalent step exists in their home jurisdiction.

Our Taiwan payroll compliance checklist and our breakdown of employer contributions in Taiwan cover how these day rates flow through to statutory deductions.

5. The Commuting Rule That Changed in September 2025

The September 2025 amendment inserted Point 6-1, and it is the substantive new obligation in the framework.

Where a Point 6 situation exists and the employer still requires the worker to attend, the employer shall provide commuting assistance to ensure safety. Where the worker has difficulty using their original way of commuting and a taxi becomes necessary, the employer shall pay the cost. Commuting assistance covers transport, a transport allowance, or other necessary help.⁵

The Ministry restated it during Typhoon Fung-wong in November 2025, reminding employers that the default position is non-attendance, that anyone who does travel in must be given commuting support including taxi fares, and that employers must do everything possible to prevent commuting occupational injuries.¹²

That last clause carries the larger exposure. Under the occupational injury review standards, an accident during the commute at a reasonable time on the necessary route is treated as an occupational injury, subject to exclusions for unlicensed or suspended-license driving, drink or drug driving, running a red light, crossing a closed railway crossing, and racing or other dangerous driving.¹³ Article 59 of the Labor Standards Act then places compensation on the employer, covering necessary medical expenses, wages during the period the worker cannot work, and lump sums on permanent disability or death, less whatever insurance has already paid.¹⁴

6. Remote Workers and the "Just Work From Home" Instruction

Distributed teams create the assumption that a suspension is irrelevant, since nobody was commuting anyway. Two considerations cut against that.

Where the working-from-home arrangement predates the storm and the work can still be performed as agreed, the ordinary position is that it is performed as agreed and wages are paid as normal. One nuance worth noting: Point 6 turns on the worker's place of work being under a suspension notice, and for a contractually home-based employee it is arguable that the place of work is the home, which would pull them inside the protections rather than outside them.⁵ Settle it in the contract rather than assuming it.

Where it does not predate the storm, Point 3 and Point 4 both point the same way. Attendance arrangements for natural disasters are supposed to be settled in advance, and requiring specific workers to be on duty during a disaster requires prior agreement plus union or labor-management conference approval.⁵ An instruction issued at 7am on the day, converting a suspension into a remote working day for people who have no remote arrangement, is not what the guidelines contemplate.

Point 5 and Point 6 also survive the shift to remote. If a power cut, a flooded building, or a severed connection makes the work impossible or unsafe, the worker is inside the protected situations, and the prohibitions on absence marking, forced leave, and bonus deduction apply exactly as they would for an office worker.⁵

Our checklist for remote workers across Asia covers the contract clauses that make this predictable rather than improvised.

7. How Taiwan Compares With Hong Kong and Japan

Multi-market teams tend to write one adverse-weather policy and apply it everywhere. The three biggest typhoon-exposed markets in the region resolve the pay question through three different mechanisms.

The Japanese position is the one most often misread in a regional policy. A precautionary closure with the office intact defaults toward the allowance being payable, and the exception requires both that the cause arose outside the business and that no ordinary operator exercising maximum care could have avoided it.¹⁷

For teams also running Southeast Asian payroll in the same cycle, our APAC public holiday payroll guide covers the calendar mechanics. Our Hong Kong MPF compliance guide covers the contribution side of the Hong Kong row above.

8. What to Settle Before the Next Land Warning

Everything above is easier to handle in June than in the middle of a Thursday night announcement. Eight items belong in a Taiwan work rules document or employment contract.

9. How Slasify Handles Taiwan Typhoon Day Pay

We were founded in Taiwan in 2016, and we run our own local entity here rather than reaching the market through a partner network.

For a foreign company employing in Taiwan through our Employer of Record (EOR) service, a suspension day resolves without a head office decision.

• The employment contract and work rules already carry the natural-disaster clause, with the Point 6 triggers and the pay rule written in.
• We track suspension announcements per jurisdiction, because your Taipei and Kaohsiung employees can be on different footing in the same storm.
• Payroll runs against the correct basis, whether that is an ordinary working day, a rest day, or an Article 40 case with the 24-hour filing.
• Commuting assistance and taxi reimbursements are processed and documented against the September 2025 requirement.
• The attendance record shows a suspension day rather than an absence, which is what a labor inspection will look for.

"For three consecutive years, we have been recognized as a participant in Taiwan's national talent sustainability initiative, which reflects our long-term commitment to ethical hiring practices."

Based on the TALENT in Taiwan 2026 announcement¹⁸

We support payroll and hiring in over 150 countries across 130+ currencies, working with 600+ local compliance partners to serve more than 900 companies worldwide. We are also ISO 27001 certified, so your employee data is handled under an internationally recognized security standard. For teams paying across several Asian markets in the same cycle, our Global Payroll service consolidates the runs, which matters in a week when Taiwan is closed, Hong Kong is on a Signal 8, and Japan is working normally.

Talk to our Taiwan team

Before the Next Land Warning

Taiwan will close its offices again this season, probably more than once, and the announcement will arrive between 7pm and 10pm on an evening when your head office has gone home.

What makes that manageable is having decided in advance what a typhoon day costs and having written it into the contract, so the night itself involves no decision at all.

If your Taiwan work rules do not currently address this, book a demo and we will map the clause against your headcount and your current work rules.

Statutory figures reflect published Executive Yuan, Ministry of Labor, Central Weather Administration, Hong Kong Labour Department, and Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare guidance as of August 2026. Suspension thresholds, minimum wage, and penalty ranges change on announced schedules. Confirm current figures before setting a policy.