About this site

Why this site exists

Almost everything published in English about Korean immigration, tax and everyday administration falls into one of three categories. There are machine translations of Korean government pages, which are accurate and unreadable. There are forum posts, which are readable and frequently years out of date. And there are content farms that rewrite each other, compounding errors with every hop.

The rules themselves are published in Korean, by ministries, and they move. The F-2-7 scoring table is re-issued by ministerial notice. Income tax brackets are revised each January. Health insurance premium rates are set every December for the following year. A guide written in 2021 that does not say when it was written is worse than no guide at all, because it reads as authoritative.

This site works from the Korean primary sources, writes in plain English, and dates everything.

Who writes it, and why a Korean

This site is written and maintained by Joon — someone who checks every figure here against the Korean ministerial notice that issues it, and logs the corrections in public when it turns out to be wrong — and I should be straightforward about something at the outset: I am Korean. I have never held a D-2, never queued at an immigration office for my own alien registration card, and never had to work out from the outside how any of this fits together.

That is a real limitation, and I would rather name it than let you discover it. It is also, for this particular subject, the more useful half of the trade.

The rules that govern your life in Korea are written in Korean, by Korean ministries, for a Korean administrative audience. They are published as 고시 and 공고 — ministerial notices, often PDFs, frequently without any English version at all. The 2026 E-7 salary floors arrived as 법무부 공고 제2025-406호. The national pension contribution ceiling is set by a Ministry of Health and Welfare notice each March. The F-2-7 scoring table is reissued on no fixed schedule and announced in Korean only.

Reading those in the original, noticing when the wording shifts, and telling the difference between what a statute says and what a district office actually does — that is what I bring. A guide written by someone who has lived your experience but works from English secondary sources will describe the queue accurately and the rule three years late. I would rather get the rule right.

So this site does not pretend to first-hand experience of being a foreigner in Korea. Where the question is "how does this feel" or "what happened at the counter", I defer to people who have been there and I say so. Where the question is "what does the rule actually say, as of today" — that is what I am here for, and that is what I check.

What that means in practice

Because I cannot offer you my own story, I owe you something harder and more checkable instead: showing my work.

• Every number is traceable. Each figure on this site lives in a data file recording the issuing authority, a source link and the date it was verified. You can check any of them without taking my word for anything.
• Mistakes are published, not buried. The corrections log lists every substantive error found in this site's own figures, what was wrong, what it is now, and which authority settled it. It is not a short list, and it is not meant to be.
• Uncertainty is stated as uncertainty. Where sources genuinely disagree, or where an immigration office's operative figure lags the published one, the page says so and tells you whose number governs. Confident prose over a shaky fact is the failure mode I am most trying to avoid.

If you have lived through one of these processes and this site describes it wrongly, that is exactly the correction I most want. See contact — it gets acted on, and it gets logged.

How the information is produced

1. Primary sources first. HiKorea and the Korea Immigration Service for visas, the National Tax Service for tax, NHIS for health insurance, NPS for pensions, and the Korea Law Translation Center for statute text. Where an English version of a Korean page exists, the Korean original is treated as authoritative if the two differ.
2. Numbers live in data files, not prose. Every rate, threshold and point value on this site comes from a versioned JSON file in /data, each carrying the issuing authority, a source link and a review date. When a rule changes, one file changes and every page that quotes it updates with it.
3. Calculations are tested. The tax comparison, the F-2-7 scoring, the address romanizer and the name converter are covered by an automated test suite — 245 assertions, including the boundary cases around the 80-point cut-off and the point at which the flat tax election starts to win. Some tests exist specifically to stop a corrected figure from regressing: one of them fails if the F-5 income floor is ever written back as a fixed number instead of a multiple of GNI per capita.
4. Everything is dated. Each page carries a "last reviewed" date. Where a figure is due for verification, the data file says so explicitly rather than quietly presenting a stale number as current.

What this site does not do

• No legal, tax or immigration advice. This site explains how systems work in general. An immigration lawyer, a licensed tax accountant (세무사) or a labour attorney (노무사) advises on your specific case, and for anything consequential you should use one.
• No data collection. Every calculator here runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type into the tax calculator, the visa checker or the address converter is transmitted to any server, mine or anyone else's.
• No paid placement. The bank comparison, the carrier comparison and the guides carry no affiliate links and no sponsored entries. The site is supported by display advertising, which has no influence on what is written.
• No government affiliation. This is an independent site with no connection to any Korean ministry, agency or public body.
• No claim to lived experience I do not have. Where a page describes what an office visit is like rather than what the rule requires, it is drawn from published accounts and reader reports, and it says so.

Corrections

Rules change and mistakes happen. If something here is wrong, out of date, or unclear, tell me — a specific correction with a link to the authority is the most useful thing you can send, and it gets acted on. See contact.

Substantive corrections are made to the page, the review date is updated, and the change is written up in the corrections log with what was wrong and what settled it. Nothing is silently edited to pretend the earlier version never existed — including when the error was mine.

Coverage

The site currently covers visas and immigration status, income tax and social insurance, banking, health insurance, housing, and the everyday administration of settling in and leaving. All content is in English, written for a reader with no Korean.

The underlying structure supports additional languages, and Japanese, traditional Chinese and Vietnamese are the intended next locales — chosen because they cover the largest foreign-resident communities in Korea after English speakers.