Registering an Employee for Korea’s Four Insurances

Hiring is not finished when the contract is signed and the first salary goes out. Before that, you have to work out which of Korea’s four social insurances the person falls under — and file each one with the right agency, by its own deadline.

The four are not one system. National Pension, National Health Insurance, Employment Insurance and Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance each run on their own statute. The same employee, on the same contract, can be covered by one and excluded from another, and the day each filing is due is not the same day.

The combined portal merges the paperwork. It does not merge the deadlines.

The deadlines diverge, and that is the trap

The industrial accident line carries a genuine statutory exception rather than a soft “usually”: the Act on the Collection of Insurance Premiums fixes the 15th-of-the-following-month duty, and the Enforcement Decree then relieves some employees from being reported at all — short-hours work under 60 hours a month among them. That is an exception to the reporting duty, and it is not the same question as whether the person is covered, which the next section takes separately.

The Four Major Social Insurance Information Portal, and each agency’s own EDI system, will take several of these filings together. That convenience is where the mistake starts: submitting through one screen does not put the four on one statutory clock.

So the common practice — file last month’s new starters on the 15th — is late for health insurance for almost everyone. Someone who starts on the 3rd has a health deadline of the 17th, and the batch does not go out until the 15th of the next month.

If this is your first employee, there is a second question in front of all four: whether the workplace itself is registered for each insurance. Employee-level acquisition reporting assumes the workplace already exists in each system.

The wage you report is not the salary you agreed

Each insurance calculates on its own wage concept. National Pension uses a standard monthly income figure, health insurance uses a monthly remuneration figure, and employment and industrial accident insurance work from remuneration or an average monthly figure.

At the point of hire, all of them start from what the person is expected to earn for their work — base pay, position allowances, allowances paid on a fixed basis, regular bonuses — and then remove the pay that is exempt from income tax.

Two exemptions come up constantly:

Hours and contract shape decide coverage, not the job title

Whether someone is “full-time” or “contract” in your own vocabulary decides nothing. The working conditions do, and each insurance draws its line differently:

The first month is also charged differently depending on the start date. For National Pension, acquiring on the 1st means the contribution is charged for that month; acquiring on the 2nd or later normally starts the following month, though the employee may ask to pay for the acquisition month. For health insurance, acquiring employee status on the 2nd or later normally means no workplace contribution for that month, with charging from the next one.

A foreign employee’s visa alone does not decide this

Health insurance is not really a question about visa letters. It asks whether the person is lawfully working here and meets the employee subscriber test.

National Pension is the complicated one. A foreign employee is in principle covered at a Korean workplace, but three further questions follow: whether their home country gives Koreans an equivalent pension scheme, whether a social security agreement keeps them on their home scheme instead, and whether their residence status is itself excluded.

Employment insurance is where residence status matters most directly. F-2, F-5 and F-6 sit in compulsory coverage, while E-7 and F-4 are structured around applying for it.

Dependants are a separate filing again. Registering the employee does not automatically register their family. The relationship has to qualify, the income and asset conditions have to be met, and it has to be applied for — and a foreign family member may need documents proving the relationship.

There is also a waiting period that catches families relocating together. Anyone who entered Korea on or after 3 April 2024 must have lived here six months before they can be registered as a dependant. The exceptions apply from the day of entry, and the notice names them individually:

The real cost of filing late is not the fine

There is a claim that circulates in English-language advice that each unregistered employee costs ₩300,000 to ₩500,000. There is no such common rule. Each statute sets its own penalty:

• Under the National Pension Act, a failure to report or a false report by the employer carries a fine of up to ₩500,000.
• For employment insurance, the current administrative fine for failure to report — including late filing — is ₩30,000 per insured employee, subject to an aggregate cap of ₩1,000,000. False reporting is a separate, escalating schedule: ₩50,000 per person for a first offence, ₩80,000 for a second, ₩100,000 from the third.
• Health insurance and industrial accident insurance follow the violation-specific schedules in their own statutes.

In practice the retroactive assessment is the heavier problem. If employee status is confirmed later, or the acquisition date is corrected, contributions are charged backwards — and by then you have already paid salary without deducting the employee’s share. You now have to recover it from someone who has already spent it, alongside the employer’s share you also owe. The same thing happens when an employee files a claim to confirm insured status, or an agency audit finds the gap.

The order that keeps this stable

The contract itself, the minimum wage, the weekly holiday allowance and severance are covered in hiring your first employee, which is where the total cost of that ₩3,000,000 salary is worked out. Your own legal structure as the employer is in sole proprietor vs corporation.