Moving to South Korea

A visa system of letters and numbers, where the letter you hold decides almost everything.

South Korea does not select immigrants by score at the border. It sorts them into an alphabet of statuses — E-2, E-7, E-9, D-2, D-8, D-10, F-2, F-5, F-6 — each attached to a defined activity, each with its own conditions, its own renewal cycle and its own onward route. Almost every practical question about moving here resolves into a single prior question: which letter and number applies, and what does that particular status permit.

The system is administered by the Korea Immigration Service under the Ministry of Justice, and it is unusually procedural. Requirements are published, documents are specified, and the Hi Korea portal handles most applications and appointments. What is not published is discretion at the margins: two applicants with similar files can receive different outcomes depending on the regional office, the employer and the occupation code being claimed.

Korea has also begun, cautiously, to compete for people. It has expanded quotas for manual labour under the Employment Permit System, widened the list of professional occupations open to foreigners, and built a points-based long-term residence status that rewards Korean language, income and qualifications. The direction of travel is toward more openness, but the underlying logic remains category-by-category rather than general.

Why people move to South Korea

• National health insurance is compulsory, comprehensive and inexpensive by developed-country standards.
• There is a published points route, the F-2-7 long-term residence status, that rewards age, education, income and Korean language.
• Permanent residence, the F-5 status, is available after roughly five years on most qualifying tracks and removes employer dependence.
• Public safety, transport and urban infrastructure are consistently ranked among the best available anywhere.
• The technology, semiconductor, automotive, shipbuilding and battery sectors employ foreign engineers in real numbers.
• Studying at a Korean university on a D-2 status opens a job-seeking status afterwards rather than an immediate departure.

What to know before you commit

• Most professional work outside teaching and a handful of engineering roles is effectively closed without functional Korean.
• The E-7 status ties a worker to a specific employer and occupation code, and changing jobs requires immigration approval.
• Rental deposits are extreme: jeonse and wolse both require lump sums that newcomers rarely have on arrival.
• Working hours and after-hours social obligations are demanding, and expectations differ sharply from Western norms.
• Private education costs for children are among the highest in the world and are treated as near-compulsory.
• Korea generally does not permit dual citizenship for adults who naturalise, so citizenship usually means renouncing the original nationality.

The eight guides

Official sources

• Korea Immigration Service, Ministry of Justice
• Hi Korea immigration portal
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs visa portal

Checked against these pages in September 2026. Fees and processing times change without notice — confirm before you act.