Korea Business Visa: C-3-4, C-3-5, C-3-6 or C-4?

A trip your employer sends you on is not automatically a business visit under Korea’s immigration rules. The system splits somewhere else — not at who books the flight, not at who pays you, and not at how long you stay.

Before any of it, check whether the trip needs a visa at all — for many passports a short business visit is inside visa-free entry.

The portal files them in two different places

Open Short Term Visit and the three business-visitor routes sit together:

Business Visitor (General) C-3-4, (Agreement) C-3-5 and (Sponsored) C-3-6.

Open Professional, and C-4 is not with them:

Short-Term Employee (C-4) heads a list that runs on through Professor (E-1), Researcher (E-3) and Technical Instructor (E-4). That is the company it keeps.

C-4 is filed with the work statuses. It is not a harder business visa; it is a short employment visa that happens to be brief.

C-3-4 — Business Visitor (General)

The portal's public wording. The manual behind it is more specific.

The portal lists market research, business meetings, consultation, signing a contract, small-scale international trading — and an APEC card holder entering without a visa. The Ministry’s manual uses the same list and then adds the part that decides hard cases:

Remuneration that does not exceed the cost of staying is included; a person whose purpose is profit-making is excluded.

So a stipend covering your hotel does not push you across the line. Coming to earn does.

Issued for 90 days, with three months of visa validity. The documents are the application, passport, photograph and fee, plus an invitation and evidence of the commercial purpose — typically the inviting company’s business registration certificate or corporate registry extract. Missions set their own list to suit local conditions.

The rule that decides most real cases

This is the paragraph worth sending to whoever books the flights.

Read that against C-3-4’s own list and the boundary becomes usable rather than philosophical:

BUSINESS VISIT                      SHORT-TERM WORK
market research                     installing imported machinery
business contact                    maintaining or repairing it
consultation                        shipbuilding work
contract negotiation and signing    fabricating or supervising equipment
small-scale trading                 substantive services under a contract

Discussing the installation is on the left. Performing it is on the right. The same engineer can make both trips in the same year and need different routes for them.

And being paid abroad does not move you back

The manual anticipates the obvious workaround and closes it in a footnote to the C-4 activity list:

A person dispatched under a service contract, purchase contract, project contract or similar arrangement, to be paid remuneration-type expenses by a Korean public or private organisation — including a person who receives those expenses outside Korea rather than in it, where they provide substantive services or perform substantive work.

So “my Korean customer isn’t paying me, my employer in Stuttgart is” answers a question nobody asked. The test is what you do here, not where the money lands.

C-3-5 — Business Visitor (Agreement)

Not a longer C-3-4. A different basis, and the manual names which agreements.

Two agreements are named in the manual, and they are not interchangeable.

Under the Korea–India CEPA, the person covered is an employee of an Indian corporation visiting to negotiate the sale of goods or services, or to prepare the establishment of an investment company.

Under the Korea–Chile FTA, the activities named are research and design, manufacturing and production, marketing, sales, distribution, after-sales service and general services.

Note the Chile row: six months of stay, not 90 days, which is the sort of thing worth knowing before assuming every C-3 is a quarter.

You do not choose C-3-5 because the trip is short and business-related. Either an agreement covers you or it does not.

C-3-6 — Business Visitor (Sponsored)

A structure, not a duration — and a closed one.

C-3-6 runs on an invitation, through the Visa Portal, from a company or organisation selected as a preferential company — selection requiring a recommendation from the Minister of SMEs and Startups, the chairman of the Korea Federation of SMEs, or the chairman of the Korea International Trade Association.

For those it does cover: 90 days of stay, one year of validity, multiple entry, applied for as a Confirmation of Visa Issuance on Form No. 21, with the applicant’s employment certificate and an invitation issued by the preferential company. The sponsor files in Korea; the applicant then applies at a mission with the confirmation.

C-4 — Short-Term Employee

Defined as short-term activity for profit — which is the whole point.

Outside the seasonal-work subtypes, C-4-5 covers:

The cap on a single grant is 90 days. And one exclusion worth stating outright: simple manual labour does not qualify for C-4-5. C-4 is not a general-purpose short-term work permit.

For the machinery case, the manual asks for the underlying service, purchase or project contract and a dispatch or business-trip order on top of the usual application, passport, photograph and fee — and requires that the contract actually contain the installation obligation, and that the applicant hold the skills it needs.

The narrow exception for a public-interest talk

Not every paid-sounding lecture is C-4, but the exemption is tight and every condition has to hold at once:

Meet all four and a C-3, B-1 or B-2 holder can do it. A private company inviting you for a commercial purpose is C-4-5 regardless — the manual says so in the same breath.

Which is why “am I being paid?” is the wrong first question. Who invited you, why, under what arrangement, and for how much of your stay all sit above it.

Status and channel are two different questions

Separate radio buttons for Meeting, Conference, Business Trip and Work — then a separate Status of Stay list where C-3 and C-4 are different rows.

Note that the dropdown offers C-3 (Short-Term General), not C-3-4, C-3-5 and C-3-6 as separate items. Picking C-3 there does not settle which sub-category you end up in.

The same screen asks whether a Korean company is inviting you, and wants its Visa Portal ID, business registration number, name, representative and relationship to you:

The Korean host is part of the application, not background to it.

e-Visa and e-Form are not the same thing

e-Visa exists to remove the in-person visit — for the statuses it covers.

An e-Form is an online form. You print it with its barcode and take it to the consulate.

Which side is your trip on?

A routing aid, not a determination. The mission reviews the case, and the manual itself is explicit that offices may add to or subtract from its document lists.

Two things that do not work

The order to answer in

Do not run it backwards by choosing a convenient visa and describing the trip to fit.

Make the documents tell one story

Invitation, contract, dispatch order, application and the purpose ticked on the form should all describe the same trip: who invited the traveller, why, what will be performed, which contract requires it, how long it takes, and who is paying. Inconsistency between those is a problem you create for yourself.

The short version

Korea does not ask whether you are travelling for business. It asks whether you are coming to conduct business or to perform work, and it files those two answers in different parts of the system.

C-3-4 for market research, business contact, consultation, contracts and small-scale trading — with pay that does not exceed your costs, and not for profit. C-3-5 under the India CEPA or the Chile FTA. C-3-6 where an already-designated preferential company invites you. C-4 for profit-making short-term activity: performances, advertising, paid talks, research, technical guidance, and the installation and maintenance work that the manual names by hand.

And the sentence to take away, because it is the one most trips get wrong: work performed in Korea stays work even when you are paid abroad.