THR Lands in Your Account Once a Year. Here's a Split That Survives Past the First Week
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6 min read
THR (Tunjangan Hari Raya, the mandatory religious holiday allowance) lands in most Indonesian workers' accounts about a week before Idul Fitri. By law it is at least one full month's salary. And for a huge number of people, it is gone within days: mudik tickets, oleh-oleh, new clothes, angpao for nieces and nephews, and a paylater bill that was easy to ignore in January. A THR allocation split, a fixed set of percentages decided before the money lands rather than after, is the difference between THR that funds a real holiday and THR that just delays a cash crunch by two weeks.
The rules are set in Permenaker No. 6 of 2016, Indonesia's Manpower Ministry regulation on the religious holiday allowance, and reinforced by the ministry's own annual circular (SE Menaker No. M/3/HK.04.00/III/2026 for 2026). The core numbers:
The Manpower Ministry has also been explicit that THR must be paid in full, not in installments, and no later than seven days before the holiday (H-7). An employer who pays late or short is breaking the rule, not offering a courtesy.
THR usually has to cover several obligations that all land in the same short window: transport home for mudik, gifts and angpao for family, new clothes, and often a chunk of debt that was easy to defer until "THR comes in." None of these are optional in the way discretionary spending is, which is exactly why a plan matters more here than for a regular paycheck.
Mudik alone is a real cost, not a vague one. A KedaiKOPI survey of 1,053 Indonesians conducted between 26 February and 7 March 2026 found that 79.6% of respondents set aside a specific mudik budget, averaging Rp3,400,000 (Kompas, 12 March 2026). That single line item, on its own, can already eat a large share of one month's THR, before gifts, clothes or debt are even counted.
Rather than spending in the order bills and requests arrive, a fixed percentage split decided in advance forces every obligation to compete for the same pie upfront. One reasonable starting split:
| Category | Share of THR | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Debt and bills due that month | 30% | Paylater balances, credit card, other short-term debt |
| Savings or emergency fund | 25% | Money that doesn't get spent this month at all |
| Mudik and gift obligations | 25% | Transport, oleh-oleh, angpao |
| Discretionary | 20% | New clothes, eating out, anything just for you |
This is a starting framework, not a rule that fits every household. Someone with no debt can shift that 30% toward savings; someone supporting several younger relatives with angpao may need to shift the mudik-and-gifts share higher.
Jakarta's 2026 minimum wage, UMP DKI Jakarta, is set at Rp5,729,876 a month, up 6.17% from 2025 (Kompas, reporting Governor Pramono Anung's wage decree, December 2025). For a worker at that salary with 12 months or more of tenure, THR equals that same amount. Applying the split above:
| Category | Share | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Debt and bills | 30% | Rp1,718,963 |
| Savings / emergency fund | 25% | Rp1,432,469 |
| Mudik and gifts | 25% | Rp1,432,469 |
| Discretionary | 20% | Rp1,145,975 |
Notice the gap: the KedaiKOPI survey's average mudik budget, Rp3,400,000, is more than double the Rp1,432,469 this split sets aside for mudik and gifts combined at this exact salary. That is not a flaw in the math. It shows that for many households, mudik is funded across the whole year from regular savings, not purely from THR, which is one more reason the 25% mudik line above should be treated as a floor to top up in advance, not the entire travel budget arriving in one lump sum a week before departure.
Debt with real interest attached, like a paylater balance carried past its due date, generally deserves priority over building savings, since the cost of carrying it typically outweighs what a savings account earns in the same period. That is why debt sits at the top of the split above. But zeroing out savings entirely to pay down every debt in one shot is usually a mistake too: it leaves nothing if something goes wrong the following month, right after the one month of the year most households are cash-poor from holiday spending.
If you are still building your first cash cushion, how large that fund should be depends heavily on how many people depend on your income, not just on your salary alone. The 25% "savings" line above is a reasonable place to route THR toward that target rather than a target in itself.
A percentage split only works if you can see, a month later, whether it held. Log the "savings" portion of your THR as a cash holding in your NetWort Dashboard the same week it lands, next to the rest of your net worth. That way the part of your THR meant to last past Idul Fitri shows up in your actual numbers instead of quietly merging back into your everyday spending account.