Service Agreement (Monthly Retainer)

About this template

When to use it

A one-page contract form for work that repeats every month on a fixed monthly fee — system maintenance, outsourced operations, an advisory retainer, cleaning and security. Because the money attaches to a period rather than to a finished deliverable, what has to be settled differs from a build-once project: what gets done each month (scope), what it is measured against when it slips (response and recovery times), and how work past the scope is counted (extra hours). Items 1, 2 and 3 are exactly those three.

If you need the long article-by-article version, download the Service Agreement template on this site as well. There are no article numbers and no special-terms box here — every condition sits on a single sheet. Korean law governs throughout.

What is in the file

• The label “Fixed monthly fee · continuing service contract” above the title, then one gray line: “Complete it in order, from Routine inspection work through Handover and return of materials.”
• A four-cell header table: Client (Party A) · Contractor (Party B) · Contract term · Monthly fixed fee, pre-filled with ○○○○ Co., Ltd., ◇◇◇◇ Co., Ltd., 2026-04-01 ~ 2027-03-31 and “KRW 3,500,000 (VAT excluded)”.
• Three numbered items, each a gray lead line plus three bullets.
• A Key metrics table — values on the top row, labels underneath.
• A Confirmation and approval table with two empty seal boxes, “Client (seal)” and “Contractor (seal)”.

Filling order

1. Start with the header table. If you contract VAT-inclusive, change that parenthesis first or everything below it drifts.
2. 1. Routine inspection work — list only what happens every month without being asked. The sample bullet “Two scheduled inspections a month, with the checklist submitted” carries both a count and an output. Drop the count and the clause reads as work on request.
3. 2. Incident response and severity levels — define the levels first, then the time for each: “Level 1 incident answered within 30 min”, “Level 2 incident restored within 4 hours”. Whatever you write here has to match the Key metrics table below.
4. 3. Monthly reporting and settlement — the report date (“Monthly operations report by the 5th of the following month”), the approval route for work past the included hours, and how costs outside the fixed fee are settled.
5. Replace the four Key metrics cells — Monthly uptime 99.5%, Level 1 response 30 min, Hours in the fee 8 hours per month, Contract term 12 months — with your own. If the body and the table disagree, the contract argues with itself.

How to read the figures

• The 8 hours a month inside the fee normally do not roll over. Say in item 3 whether they do. Left unsaid, it is argued every month.
• 99.5% monthly uptime allows roughly 3 hours 36 minutes of outage over a 30-day month. State whether planned maintenance windows come out of that calculation.
• Price the extra hours separately from the fee. Without an hourly rate and a night and holiday premium there is nothing to invoice against.

Before you sign

• Check that the people doing the work are the Contractor’s own employees. Where the Client directs and supervises them day to day, the arrangement may be treated as worker dispatch, and a different statute then applies whatever the contract says.
• Write down how much of the Client’s material the Contractor will see. Access widens over a long retainer, which is why a separate non-disclosure agreement usually sits alongside this one.

Common mistakes

• Setting the term but never saying whether it renews automatically. For continuing work, how it ends matters more than how it starts.
• Writing uptime and response times with no consequence — a fee reduction, a right to terminate — when they are missed. Metrics with no effect are a declaration.
• Not listing what comes back at the end — operating documents, account lists, data. Handover terms only work if written at the start.
• Treating this form as legal advice. It is not. Where the amounts are large, or where you have to cap liability or decide who owns the intellectual property, have it reviewed by a qualified professional before anyone signs.