Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) is a term often used to refer to Filipino migrant workers, people with Filipino citizenship who reside in another country for a limited period of employment. The number of these workers was roughly 1.77 million between April and September 2020. Of these, female workers comprised a larger portion, making up 59.6 percent, or 1.06 million. However, this number declined to 405.62 thousand between 2019 and 2020.

OFW money remittances to relatives in the Philippines are a major contributor to the Philippine economy, reaching a total of P1.9 trillion in 2022, which represented some 8.9% of the Philippines' Gross Domestic Product.

The term "Overseas Filipino Worker" (OFW) was used as early as the 1990s to refer to Filipino migrant workers, when Republic Act 8042, also known as the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995 was enacted. The term was officially adopted by the Philippine government when the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) formulated the 2002 POEA Rules and Regulations Governing the Recruitment and Employment of Land-based Overseas Workers. Historically, particularly during the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos, the term "Overseas Contract Worker" (OCW) was used.

For statistical and probability purposes, the term "Overseas Contract Worker" refers to OFWs with an active employment contract, while OFWs who are not OCWs are migrant workers currently without a contract who had one within a given period of time.

Filipino migrant workers were working outside the Philippine islands as early as the 1900s, when Filipino agricultural workers were deployed to Hawaii to satisfy temporary labor needs in the then-U.S. territory's agricultural sector. Filipino workers then went on to the Mainland United States to work in hotels, restaurants, and sawmills, as well as getting involved in railroad construction. They also worked in plantations in California and the canning industry of the then-American territory of Alaska. Some Filipinos also served in the U.S. Army during World War II.

Following the end of World War II, some Filipinos who served in the U.S. Army became American citizens. The United States also saw increased immigration of Filipino medical professionals, accountants, engineers, and other technical workers after the war. From the 1950s to the 1960s, non-professional contract workers began migrating to other Asian countries; artists, barbers, and musicians worked in East Asia, and loggers worked in Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo.

According to the Philippine Department of Labor and Employment, "active and systemic migration" of Filipinos for temporary employment began by the 1960s, when the United States government, contractors of the US Armed Forces, and civilian agencies began recruiting Filipinos to work in jobs in the construction and service sector. This was encouraged by the passage in the US of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended national immigration quotas and provided an unlimited number of visas for family reunification. Filipinos also worked in select areas in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, namely Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, and the US territories of Guam and Wake Island.

Overseas employment first became the subject of Philippine government policy in the early 1970s, in response to a series of crises brought about by heavy government spending linked to Ferdinand Marcos' 1969 campaign for his second presidential term. Beginning with the 1969 Philippine balance of payments crisis, these resulted in a spike in unemployment, an urgent need for foreign exchange to resolve the country's balance of payments, and a period of social unrest that kicked off with what is now known as the First Quarter Storm. More Filipino medical workers began to search for work in Australia, Canada, and the United States. This compelled the Marcos administration to create a short-term labor policy that included overseas employment.