South Korea

Korea has no retirement visa. There is no status in Attached Table 1 or Attached Table 1-2 of the Enforcement Decree of the Immigration Act for a person who has stopped working and wants to live here on a pension. What exists instead sits one level up: item 11 of Attached Table 1-3, the table describing who is eligible for permanent residence, covers a person aged sixty or over who is receiving a pension from abroad of at least the amount the Minister of Justice determines. A retired foreigner is therefore not a candidate for a temporary status that might later become permanent - the pension is itself a permanent-residence qualification, and the only thresholds are the age, which the Decree states, and the pension amount, which it leaves to a notice. The permanent status it leads to is unusual in its own right: article 10-3(1) of the Immigration Act says a holder of permanent residence is subject to no restriction on the scope of activities and no limit of period, which is what makes the destination worth more than the ordinary five-year residence status. The general qualifying conditions in article 10-3(2) still apply: good conduct including compliance with Korean law, sufficient means of support by one's own assets or ability or by a household member's, and the basic knowledge appropriate to a permanent resident, such as Korean language and understanding of Korean customs and culture.

Article 7(1) of the Immigration Act states the default in one sentence: an entering foreigner must hold a valid passport and a visa issued by the Minister of Justice. Article 7(2) then lists four classes who may enter without one, and only the second of them is about nationality - a national of a country that has concluded a visa exemption agreement with Korea, to the extent the agreement exempts them. The third covers a person admitted separately for international friendship, tourism or the interests of Korea, which is the hook for the reciprocal visa-free admission Korea grants outside any treaty. How long a visa-free visitor may stay is not in article 7 at all. It is in article 10-2(1)1, which defines the short-term status of residence as a stay of not more than 90 days for the purpose of tourism or visiting - and then adds, inside the same bracket, that where a visa exemption agreement or reciprocity gives more than 90 days, that longer period is the limit. There is no 90-in-180 rolling window in the Korean statute: the figure is a cap on one stay under a short-term status, and the Act leaves the agreement free to raise it. Two short-term statuses carry visa-free arrivals, and the Enforcement Decree keeps them apart: B-1 for a national of a treaty country doing what the treaty allows, B-2 for someone arriving without a visa for tourism or transit. Since 2020 the Act has also carried article 7-3, under which the Minister of Justice may require anyone in either of those classes to obtain a prior travel permit - K-ETA - before boarding, with the criteria and procedure left to a ministerial decree rather than written into the Act.

Korea's statuses of residence are a closed list in three attached tables of the Enforcement Decree of the Immigration Act: Attached Table 1 holds five short-term statuses, Attached Table 1-2 holds thirty-one long-term ones from A-1 to H-2, and Attached Table 1-3 holds the nineteen descriptions of a person eligible for permanent residence. Read through, none of them is granted for having means of support from outside Korea. The long-term table admits people for study, training, religion, posting, investment, trade, job-seeking, teaching, research, performance, specified activity, seasonal and non-professional employment, crewing, family visiting, residence, accompaniment, overseas Korean status, marriage, working holiday and work-visit - and the residence status F-2, which is the only place income appears at all. Item 24(i) of that table admits a person whose age, education and income meet standards the Minister of Justice determines and publishes: income is one criterion in a points test, not a route of its own, and the pass mark and the amounts are in the Minister's notice rather than in the Decree. The two routes that come closest to living in Korea on your own money are therefore both indirect: item 24(f), five years of continuous residence on any status other than the diplomatic ones with your centre of life in Korea, and item 11 of the permanent-residence table, which takes a person of sixty or over receiving a foreign pension straight to permanent residence. One opening keeps this from being an exhaustive negative: item 30 of the long-term table, G-1, covers a person who fits none of the listed statuses and whom the Minister of Justice nonetheless recognises.

Article 18(1) of the Immigration Act makes employment a function of status: a foreigner who wants to work in Korea must hold a status of residence that permits employment activity, as prescribed by Presidential Decree. The Decree supplies that list in Attached Table 1-2, which runs from D-1 to H-2 and names the employment statuses one by one - professor E-1, foreign-language conversation instructor E-2, research E-3, technical guidance E-4, professional employment E-5, arts and entertainment E-6, specified activity E-7, seasonal work E-8, non-professional employment E-9, vessel crew E-10. Only one of them is open-ended, and it is open-ended by delegation: E-7 covers a person who intends to engage in activities specially designated by the Minister of Justice under a contract with a Korean public institution or private organisation. The occupations are in the Minister's notice, not in the Decree, and that notice is where the route actually lives. Two further restrictions sit on top of the status. Article 18(2) says a holder may not work anywhere but the designated workplace, and article 21(1) requires prior permission from the Minister of Justice to change or add one - with a proviso that lets a person of expert knowledge, skill or ability, as prescribed by Presidential Decree, report within 15 days instead; article 26-2 of the Enforcement Decree identifies that person as a holder of E-1 to E-7 who meets requirements the Minister notifies, and article 21(3) switches off the designated-workplace rule for them entirely. Doing anything outside your status needs its own permission under article 20. The maximum period of stay per grant is in Attached Table 1 of the Enforcement Rules: three years for E-7 and E-9, two for E-2 and E-6, five for E-1, E-3, E-4 and E-5, and one year for the job-seeking status D-10.

Korean investment immigration is built in layers, and only the middle layer carries figures in the Decree. The entry status is D-8, business investment, and item 11 of Attached Table 1-2 gives it three limbs: essential professional personnel engaged in the management, administration, production or technology of a foreign-invested company under the Foreign Investment Promotion Act, excluding a person who invested in an unincorporated business run by a foreigner and anyone recruited inside Korea; the founder of a venture business holding intellectual property or outstanding technology who has obtained venture confirmation; and the founder of a corporation recognised by the Minister of Justice who holds intellectual property or equivalent technology and has a Korean associate degree or a foreign bachelor's degree or a central ministry's recommendation. No amount appears in any of the three. The amounts appear at the next step, item 24(d) of the same table, which turns a foreign investor into a holder of the residence status F-2: five hundred thousand US dollars invested and three years of continuous stay on D-8, or the same five hundred thousand invested by a foreign corporation whose dispatched officer or employee has stayed three years, or three hundred thousand US dollars invested by a person employing two or more Korean nationals. Item 24(j) runs a separate route for an investor in real estate or other assets on terms the Minister of Justice publishes, and caps how many people a corporate investor may bring. Permanent residence then has four of its own investment items: five hundred thousand dollars with five Korean employees; five years of maintained investment under item 24(j); three years on the third limb of D-8 having attracted three hundred million won and employing two Koreans; and an amount the Minister publishes, held for five years, which also reaches the investor's spouse and children.

Item 5 of Attached Table 1-2 of the Enforcement Decree of the Immigration Act defines the study status D-2 in a single sentence: a person who intends to receive education in a regular course, or to carry out a specific piece of research, at an educational institution of junior-college level or above or at an academic research institution. There is no tuition threshold, no funds requirement and no language condition in the Decree; article 9-2 of the Enforcement Rules applies the general visa criteria, the last of which sends everything else to standards the Minister of Justice sets separately for each status. The general training status D-4, item 7 of the same table, sits beside it for education or training at an institution or company meeting conditions the Minister sets, and excludes anyone receiving remuneration beyond living costs from the training body as well as anyone who qualifies for D-2 or for the technical training status D-3. The period is two years at a time for both D-2 and D-4, the same as for cultural and artistic activity D-1. What the Decree does not give a student is any right to work: article 18(1) of the Immigration Act requires a status that permits employment activity, and study is not one, so a part-time job needs a permission for activities outside the status under article 20. After graduation the job-seeking status D-10 covers a person who intends to train or look for work in a field within E-1 to E-7, for one year at a time.

Korea's ancestry route is a statute of its own, the Act on the Immigration and Legal Status of Overseas Koreans, and the status it creates - F-4 - is the most generous long-term status in the Immigration Act's table while being defined entirely outside it. Article 2(2) of the Act covers a person who once held Korean nationality, including someone who emigrated before the Republic was founded, or their lineal descendant, who has acquired a foreign nationality, as further prescribed by Presidential Decree. Article 3 of that Decree, rewritten on 2 July 2019, narrows it to two cases and neither carries a generation limit: a person who held Korean nationality by birth and acquired a foreign one, and a lineal descendant of such a person who acquired a foreign one. What the status gives is unusual. Article 10(5) says employment and other economic activity are freely permitted to the extent that they do not impair social order or economic stability - no designated workplace, no occupation list, no permission to change employer. Article 10(3) removes the need for a re-entry permit. Article 10(4) deems the domestic residence report to be alien registration under the Immigration Act. Article 11 gives equal rights with Korean nationals over real estate, subject to the ordinary transaction reports; article 12 makes the holder a resident for the purposes of the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act when dealing with a Korean bank; article 14 brings health insurance within reach after 90 days. Against all that stands article 5(2), and it is the heart of this route's reputation. A man who renounced or lost Korean nationality without completing, being enlisted for, or being exempted from military service is refused the status - and the Korean proviso says the Minister of Justice may grant it from 1 January of the year he turns forty-one where he finds it necessary.

Marriage migration is status F-6, and Attached Table 1-2 of the Enforcement Decree gives it three limbs: the spouse of a Korean national; a father or mother raising a child born of a marriage - including a de facto marriage - with a Korean national, where the Minister of Justice so recognises; and a person who was living in Korea married to a Korean national and can no longer maintain a normal marriage because of the spouse's death or disappearance or some other cause not their own fault, again where the Minister so recognises. Getting the visa is governed by the Enforcement Rules of the Immigration Act, and they are unusual in how much of the inquiry points at the Korean. Article 9-4 requires the Korean spouse to issue the invitation and makes them the guarantor, and where the Minister's notice applies, to have completed the international marriage guidance programme. Article 9-5 then lets the consulate examine twelve matters, and eight of them are about the inviter: whether they have invited another spouse in the last five years; whether they meet the income requirement, which the Minister of Justice publishes every year by reference to the standard median income under the National Basic Living Security Act; whether they have secured normal housing where a couple can live together, with rooming houses, motels and greenhouse structures excluded by name; whether three years have passed since they themselves naturalised through marriage or obtained permanent residence as a spouse; and four separate criminal-history bars, ten years for domestic violence, sexual offences against children and young people, sexual and violent crime and murder, and five years for a false marriage registration. The applicant's side is the circumstances of the relationship, the validity of the marriage under both countries' law, the mutual exchange of health and criminal-record information, and basic Korean. The Minister may waive some of this where the couple already have a child together.

Article 5 of the Nationality Act sets six requirements for general naturalisation and the second of them is the one that reorders the whole path: since 19 December 2017 an applicant must already hold a status of residence that allows permanent residence in Korea. The five consecutive years of domicile sit alongside it, not instead of it, so the ordinary route runs through F-5 rather than straight from a work status. The other four requirements are adulthood under the Civil Act, good conduct as prescribed by Ministerial Decree of Justice, the ability to support oneself from one's own assets or ability or through the family one lives with, and basic knowledge as a Korean national including Korean language proficiency and an understanding of Korean customs; the Minister of Justice must also be satisfied that naturalisation would not harm national security, public order or public welfare. Article 6 cuts the five years to three and drops the permanent-residence requirement for three groups - a person whose father or mother was once Korean, a person born in Korea to a parent also born in Korea, and an adult adoptee of a Korean national - and runs a separate scheme for the spouse of a Korean national: two years of domicile while married, or three years of marriage with one year of domicile. Nationality is acquired not on the grant but at the moment the applicant swears the oath of citizenship before the Minister of Justice and receives the certificate. Then article 10 applies: the foreign nationality must be renounced within one year, on pain of losing Korean nationality automatically when that year runs out. Five categories may instead swear never to exercise the foreign nationality in Korea, and two of them are the spouse limbs of article 6(2) - which is why marriage is the ordinary way a naturalised Korean keeps a second passport.

Article 1-2(1)1 of the Income Tax Act defines a resident as an individual who has a domicile in Korea or a place of residence of 183 days or more. The two limbs are alternatives and only the second carries a number: a domicile makes you resident with no days counted at all, and the Enforcement Decree decides whether you have one by the objective facts of your living relationships - whether your family lives with you in Korea and whether your property is here. Article 2(3) of the Decree then deems a domicile in two situations that look like day counts but are not: holding an occupation that normally requires you to live in Korea continuously for 183 days or more, and having family here whose presence, with your job and assets, makes continuous residence of 183 days or more the expectation. Neither asks whether the days have happened. Where the 183 days are counted, article 4 of the Decree counts them from the day after entry to the day of departure, and treats the test as met either by 183 days in one tax period or by 183 continuous days spanning two of them - so a stay that straddles a new year can make you resident without ever reaching 183 days in a single calendar year. The tax period is the calendar year. Residence begins on the day the domicile is established or on the 183rd day of residence, not retrospectively. And article 3(1) carries something unusual: a foreign resident whose domicile or residence in Korea totals five years or less in the ten years ending with the tax period is taxed on foreign-source income only to the extent it is paid in Korea or remitted here. It is a remittance basis written into the general charging provision, available by nationality rather than by election, and it runs out.

Two statutes decide what a foreigner can do with a Korean bank, and neither mentions a visa category. The Act on Real Name Financial Transactions and Confidentiality requires a financial company to deal only in a customer's real name, and article 3(4) of its Enforcement Decree says what a foreigner's real name is: the name and registration number on the alien registration record kept under the Immigration Act, or - where no alien registration card has been issued - the name and number on a passport or identity document. That proviso matters, because it means the Act itself does not make alien registration a precondition for an account; it makes it the ordinary form of identification and names the fallback. The second statute is the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act, which runs its own residence test and gets a different answer from the tax law. Article 3(1)14 defines a resident as an individual with a domicile or a place of residence in Korea, and article 10(1)4 of the Enforcement Decree then deems a foreigner to be one if they are engaged in business activity in Korea or have been staying here for six months or more - not the 183 days the Income Tax Act counts, and not counted the same way. Going the other way, article 10(2)6(c) turns a foreigner who was a resident into a non-resident once they have been abroad for three months. Resident or non-resident is what decides which accounts, which transfers and which reporting duties apply, and the Overseas Koreans Act gives holders of F-4 with a domestic residence report the rights of a Korean national who is a resident under the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act - except for the capital-transaction reporting in article 18 of that Act, which is carved out by name.

National Health Insurance is compulsory in Korea and article 109 of the National Health Insurance Act is the article that decides how a foreigner gets into it. Employment is the easy route: a foreigner working at a covered workplace becomes an employee-insured person automatically, with no waiting period, provided they are on the resident register, have reported a domestic place of residence as an overseas Korean, or have completed alien registration under article 31 of the Immigration Act. Everyone else has to qualify as a self-employed insured person under article 109(3), and that is where the waiting period lives. The Act does not state it: it delegates both the period and the grounds to a Ministry of Health and Welfare ordinance, and article 61-2(1) of the Enforcement Rules fills in six months or more - or, instead of the six months, one of four statuses that are taken as evidence of continuous residence from the start: permanent residence under article 10(2) of the Immigration Act, non-professional employment E-9, marriage migration, and whichever study or general training statuses the Minister designates by notice. A second table, Attached Table 9 of the same Rules, lists the statuses that can be self-employed insured at all - the D, E, F, H families, plus G-1 limited to humanitarian-stay permission holders and persons the Service designates. Since 2 January 2024 a dependent of an employee-insured foreigner has had to meet the same residence test, with the spouse and children under nineteen excepted by name. Two things then apply to a foreign self-employed insured person and to nobody else: the contribution is due by the 25th of the month before the month it covers, where everyone else pays by the 10th of the month after; and arrears stop benefits from the day of the arrears until the debt is cleared, with the reliefs other debtors get switched off. The Constitutional Court found that last rule incompatible with the Constitution on 26 September 2023, and the statute carries the amendment that followed, dated 22 October 2024, in a note under the article.

Two things have to be true before a foreigner can hold a Korean licence at all. Article 82(1)7 of the Road Traffic Act disqualifies a non-Korean who has not completed alien registration under article 31 of the Immigration Act - unless exempt from it - or, as an overseas Korean, has not filed a domestic residence report. Before that point there is only article 96, which lets a holder of an international driving permit under the 1949 Geneva or 1968 Vienna Convention, or of a foreign licence Korea recognises bilaterally, drive for one year from the date of entry, limited to the vehicle types written on the permit, and not for hire. Conversion itself is built as an exemption from parts of the driving test rather than as an exchange. Article 84(1)3 lets a registered resident, a registered foreigner, a recognised refugee or an overseas Korean with a residence report skip part of the test on the strength of a foreign licence; article 84(2) adds the conditions the licence must satisfy - obtained while staying more than 90 days in the issuing country during that stay, and not a temporary or learner licence - and then makes the size of the exemption turn on reciprocity. Which countries count is not decided by Korea alone: article 52(3) of the Enforcement Decree makes the Minister of Foreign Affairs survey, at least once a year, which countries exempt a Korean licence holder from everything except the aptitude test, and article 52(4) makes the Commissioner General of the National Police Agency publish the resulting list by notice. Attached Table 3 of the Enforcement Decree then sets out what that buys: from a listed country, exemption from the skills, law, inspection and road tests; from an unlisted country, exemption from the skills and road tests only, leaving the written law test to sit. Both rows lead to the same licence - Class II ordinary. Your foreign licence is taken in only where the issuing country asks for it back, or where that country itself takes in a Korean licence when it converts one.

Article 96(1) of the Customs Act gives three separate exemptions and the second is the one that matters to someone moving: goods imported by a person entering Korea in order to transfer their residence here, to the extent the head of the customs house finds them appropriate under criteria the Ministerial Decree sets, having regard to the reason for the transfer, how long the person has lived abroad, their occupation, the size of the family and other circumstances. Article 48-2(1) of the Enforcement Rules then supplies the criteria, and the intention is measured in advance: the exemption is for a foreigner, or a Korean permanent resident abroad, who intends to establish a residence in Korea and live here for one year, or six months if accompanied by family. The goods themselves must be normal household goods, used for three months or more before entry and expected to go on being used after it. Motor vehicles, ships, aircraft and any item of jewellery, pearl, tortoiseshell, coral, amber or ivory with a dutiable value of five million won or more are excluded by name. Separately shipped removal goods must arrive within six months of the owner's entry unless a natural disaster or similar cause intervenes, and the same six months applies to a traveller's unaccompanied baggage. For what a traveller carries in, article 48(2) sets the basic exemption at eight hundred US dollars of dutiable value per person, with alcohol, tobacco and perfume allowed separately on their own table and no exemption at all on alcohol or tobacco for anyone under nineteen. Article 96(2) adds a rebate for honesty: a traveller who voluntarily declares what is over the limit gets thirty per cent of the duty back, up to two hundred thousand won.