Korea’s Four Social Insurances, From Your Side

The gap between the salary in your contract and the money in your account is mostly four insurances and two taxes. On the 2026 rates the insurance side is about 9.7% of pay — but that number is where the explanation starts, not where it ends.

The four schemes are not one deduction split four ways. They insure different risks, they are governed by different statutes, and — the part that breaks most attempts to check a payslip — they do not share a calculation base.

They overlap heavily. They are not identical, and the difference is where checks fail.

The 2026 rates

Long-term care is charged as 13.14% of the health insurance contribution rather than as a rate on pay, which is why it comes out as the odd 0.9448% figure — the long-term care rate.

The employee side adds to roughly 9.7%, before income tax and local income tax.

The pension rate is on a path, not at a level

The national pension rose for the first time since 1998, and 2026 is the first step rather than the destination — the national pension rate records the legislated path to 13% in 2033, half a point a year.

Where 9.7% stops being the answer

Each scheme applies its rate to its own base.

The pension uses standard monthly income, bounded at ₩410,000 and ₩6,590,000. So a ₩10,000,000 salary does not attract 4.75% of ₩10,000,000 — the contribution stops climbing at the ceiling, and the effective share of actual pay falls as pay rises.

Health insurance works on remuneration with its own limits. Employment insurance uses its own statutory remuneration concept. And none of the three is the same thing as taxable employment income under the tax code, even though the non-taxable items overlap heavily.

A worked month at ₩3,000,000

Assuming every scheme applies and all four bases are ₩3,000,000 — a simplification, and a useful one:

national pension       ₩3,000,000 × 4.75%    = ₩142,500
health insurance       ₩3,000,000 × 3.595%   = ₩107,850
long-term care         ₩3,000,000 × 0.4724%  =  ₩14,172
employment insurance   ₩3,000,000 × 0.9%     =  ₩27,000
industrial accident                              ₩0
                                                ─────────
                                                ₩291,522

Income tax and local income tax then come off separately, from the withholding table rather than from a rate. Treat ₩291,522 as a check, not a target: the declared bases and rounding will move it.

What each one actually insures

The framing that costs people money is treating these as a savings scheme with a poor return. They are four insurances against four different risks.

The pension needs ten years to become a pension

An old-age pension in pension form generally requires ten years of coverage.

Below that the contributions are not lost, but they are dealt with under the refund rules — and those turn on nationality, a social security agreement or your status of stay, not on the amount paid in. For anyone whose Korean stay is measured in years rather than decades, that is the question, and it is the subject of the afternoon guide.

Long-term care is not a benefit you draw on next year

You pay it monthly; it pays for care for people with a long-term care grade, through home and facility services. Contributing does not entitle you to an equivalent sum. That is what makes it insurance rather than saving, and the same is true of the other three in different measures.

Industrial accident is never your deduction

The employer pays the entire premium. If a line for employee-borne industrial accident insurance is reducing your net pay, that is the one item on a Korean payslip worth querying the same day.

What it buys is concrete: medical care benefits, disability benefits, survivors’ benefits, and — for time off work through an occupational injury — 70% of average wage per day where the conditions are met.

The order to check in

which schemes you are actually enrolled in
  → the base each one declared
  → the rate for the year, not for 2025
  → the employee share
  → then the tax lines, separately

The first line is doing the most work, and it is where foreign employees diverge from their Korean colleagues — differently for each of the four, under four different tests. Two people in the same job on the same salary can correctly have different deductions, and that is the subject of the other half of this pair.