An independent reference for living and working in South Korea — written in English, from the Korean primary sources, and dated so you know how fresh it is.
Popular: F-2-7 points Registration card 19% flat tax Year-end settlement
Each one is rule-based: the same inputs always produce the same answer, and the reasoning is shown alongside the result so you can check it against the official source yourself. Everything runs in your browser — nothing you type is sent anywhere.
Can I get a residence visa (거주비자)? Scored out of 170 against the 2026 table.
FreeInstantShould I elect the 19% flat rate (단일세율), or stay on the progressive brackets?
FreeNo sign-upTurn a Korean address (도로명주소) into the official English form. Works offline.
InstantNo sign-upWrite your name in Korean, correctly (한글 이름 표기법) — not a raw transliteration.
FreeInstantMost people arrive here in one of four situations. Each one is a sequence, not a single page.
Registration card, bank account and a phone number — in the order that actually works.
Which status you qualify for now, what each one still requires, and the route between them.
Year-end settlement (연말정산), the 19% election, and which one leaves you better off.
Pension lump-sum refund, deposit recovery, and closing accounts in the right order.
Long-form, sourced from Korean government material, and dated so you know how fresh it is.
What each of the 170 points is actually for, why annual income decides most applications, and why 80 points is a floor rather than a finish line.
The election looks generous and usually is not. Where the crossover sits, and the three situations where it clearly wins.
Timings, the employer-side documents that hold everything up, and what to do when the two-year D-10 ceiling is approaching.
How a system with no monthly rent works, what happens when it goes wrong, and the four checks that protect your deposit.
Four areas, chosen because they are the ones where being wrong costs you money or a refusal.
Eleven categories in depth — the study statuses (D-2, D-4), the work ones (E-2, E-7), the job-search D-10, the investment D-8, and the residence family: F-2-7, F-4, F-5, F-6 and H-1. Each page states what the status permits, what it takes to get, what it takes to keep, and which status it leads to next — because almost nobody stays on their first one.
The 19% flat-rate election and why it usually loses, the year-end settlement that most foreign employees under-claim, health insurance enrolment, and the pension lump-sum refund you can claim on the way out of the country.
Jeonse and wolse compared honestly, including what happens when a deposit goes wrong; opening a bank account and the limited-account stage nobody warns you about; and sending money abroad, where one document removes a limit most people spend years working around.
Six printable checklists for the counters you physically have to stand at — registration card, bank, phone, health insurance, driving licence and leaving Korea — each listing the documents that specific office asks for, in the order the offices need to be visited.
The three most common, answered in full. Each links to the guide that shows the working.
The pass mark is 80 out of a possible 170. Common items — age (up to 25), education (up to 25), Korean language ability (up to 20) and annual income (up to 60) — are worth up to 130 between them, and bonuses such as a degree from a top-500 university, a government recommendation or KIIP completion are capped at 40. Annual income is by far the largest single item, which is why two applicants with identical qualifications can land 20 points apart. Reaching 80 does not guarantee approval: regional immigration offices apply an annual quota, so a marginal score in a busy office can fail where the same score passes elsewhere. There is also an eligibility gate before any scoring happens, and it disqualifies more people than the score does — see the F-2-7 points system explained.
Only at high salaries. The flat rate applies to gross income with no deductions, exemptions or credits at all — not the earned-income deduction, not dependants, not your pension and health insurance contributions. For most foreign workers ordinary progressive taxation wins comfortably. For a single filer with no unusual deductions the crossover sits at roughly ₩160 million of gross annual salary, and it moves higher the more you can claim. The election is also a commitment rather than an annual choice, which matters if your income is about to change. Run your own number in the flat tax comparison, or read why the election usually loses.
Reverse the order. Korean addresses run largest to smallest — province, city, district, road, building. English runs smallest to largest. So you write the building number first, then the road name with its hyphenated suffix (-ro, -daero, -gil), then the district (-gu), the city, the province, the five-digit postal code, and finally SOUTH KOREA. The road name is romanized by a published standard rather than by ear, which is why the version a courier accepts often differs from the one you would guess. The address romanizer applies that standard, and the address format guide explains why the old lot-based addresses still turn up on official documents.
Most English-language information about Korean immigration and tax is either a translation of a translation, or a forum post from 2016 that is now wrong. The rules themselves are published in Korean, by ministries, and they change — the F-2-7 table is re-issued by notice, tax rates change every January, and health insurance premiums are set each December.
This site works from those primary sources and dates everything it publishes. Where a number is due for review, it says so. Where something is genuinely uncertain, it says that too.
A reference is only worth the date on it. Korean rates and thresholds move on a predictable calendar, so the review schedule follows that calendar rather than waiting for someone to notice a number is wrong.
Income tax brackets, the health insurance rate and the minimum wage change every January. The E-7 minimum wage requirement arrives by Ministry of Justice notice and takes effect on 1 February. The Bank of Korea publishes per-capita GNI in spring, which moves the F-5 income threshold and the F-2-7 promising-industry multiplier with it, because both are defined as multiples of that figure rather than as fixed amounts. The national pension contribution ceiling and floor are set by ministerial notice in March and apply from July.
Each of those dates has a corresponding entry in the maintenance schedule, and every figure on the site lives in a versioned data file that records which authority set it and when it was last checked. When a rate changes, the fix is a one-line data edit rather than a rewrite of nine articles — which is the only reason a small site can keep this many numbers honest.
The other half of staying current is admitting what was wrong. Three figures on this site were published incorrectly and later corrected: the F-5 income requirement, which is twice the previous year's per-capita GNI rather than the fixed amount widely quoted in English; the F-5 language requirement, which cannot be met by TOPIK alone; and the D-10 pass mark. Each one is written up in the corrections log with what was wrong, what it is now, and the document that settled it.
That log is deliberately public. Any site can claim accuracy. A site that publishes its own errors, with sources, is making a claim you can actually check — and if you find a fourth, the contact page tells you exactly what to send.