Indicators and scope

Population bases

Immigration statistics in Korea cover different populations depending on the ministry and the survey. The names are similar and the figures are far apart, so decide which definition applies before quoting a number.

Note: the four definitions contain or overlap one another. The default on this site is registered foreigners; a table on another basis says so in its source line.

Indicators

Source: The indicators were computed from Open dataset.

Data limits

• Individuals cannot be followed over time. The yearbook counts people afresh each year. How many years one person stayed, or where they moved from and to, cannot be read from this data.
• Unauthorized residents are not broken down by district or nationality. Only the national total is published, so they appear in no cell of the district or nationality reports.
• Language demand is an estimate. A value calculated by applying the first-language shares of Ethnologue first-language shares are applied to the nationality composition. These are not counts of interpretation requests, and a person who speaks two languages is not distinguished. Because several first languages are spoken in one country, the languages run to about 1,594 and their totals do not sum to the registered foreign population.
• Age and sex alone are on the staying-foreigner basis. The yearbook does not publish this table on the registered basis, so the two cannot be aligned; the source line says so. Mixing figures from the two bases to compute a rate gives a wrong value.
• The data does not say why. The tables and figures show where people are and how many. Whether a fall in one district reflects a change in its industry or a move to a neighbouring district, or whether a status concentrates in one district because of the jobs there, cannot be settled from the yearbook.
• A residence status attaches to a situation, not to a person. The same person counted under a different status some years later appears in a different row. Reading the figure for a status as a cumulative count of people who arrived on it is wrong.
• The support-organization list is not official statistics. It was assembled from several portals and registers, so organizations may be missing, and the contact details are as each organization publishes them.

Scope

• District250 districts
• Nationality192
• Statuses of stay and families35
• Estimated first language1,594
• Map years2008–2025
• Open dataset26 files, 1,392,172 rows

Note: the year range differs by measure. Provinces run from 2006, districts from 2008 and sub-districts from 2014.

Support organization list

1,715 organizations support immigrants. 1,375 list a telephone number, 1,643 have an address, 1,103 have a confirmed website and 958 have a confirmed social media account.

Source

We collected records from sixty-five rosters and removed duplicates by name, address, and telephone number. These are the twelve districts with the most organizations.

The rest come from provincial education office multicultural education support centers, organizations for youth with migration backgrounds, multicultural libraries, migrant communities, bodies under the Overseas Koreans Agency, and the National Tax Service register of public-interest corporations. How many organizations each register holds and how many of them were taken is in the repository crosswalk table.

Website verification

Five searches were run for each organization and every candidate page was opened, and a website is listed only where the page carries the organization’s phone number or street address alongside its name. Pages that merely share a similar name, map services, business directory lookups and roster pages are not the organization’s website and were left blank.

Limits of the list

• Shelters for migrant women survivors of violence. 33 facilities operate nationwide (28 shelters, 4 group homes, 1 self-reliance support center), but their addresses are not disclosed by law. Only facilities whose names could be confirmed are listed at the regional level, and none appear on the map. Absence from the map is not the same as absence in reality.
• Exclusions from the density calculation. Schools and periodicals are in the list but are left out of the Organization density by district calculation. Including schools would make districts with many schools read as districts with many resources.
• Overlapping types. One organization can fall under two types, so the sum of the type counts is larger than the number of organizations.
• Local government facilities. No single national roster exists, so this was assembled from published sources. Local governments that release a lot of open data are over-represented.
• Websites and social accounts. A random sample of 176 organizations was reopened and checked by hand: 9.7 percent of the websites (95 percent CI 5.3 to 14.0) belonged to some other body, most often a similarly named organization, a parent body, or a directory page listing many organizations at once. For social accounts the rate was 4.8 percent (2.0 to 7.6) in a sample of 229. Measured 23 August 2026.
• Service type tags. We drew 60 tags at random from the services organizations describe in their own text and read the quoted sentence against the field it was assigned to. In 13.3 percent (95 percent confidence interval 5.0 to 22.0) the quotation did not support the field. None came from another organization's text, and every error was a reading inside the same organization that went wider than the quotation. Tags from statutory duties and from rosters are not in this sample. Measured on 26 August 2026.
• Addresses. All 1,643 addresses were submitted to the national address search; 1,606 (97.7 percent) exist and agree with the province and district recorded for them. Most of the rest carry unit detail or a lot-number address that the search cannot parse, and absence from the search does not establish that an address does not exist.
• Map positions. Of the 1,629 organizations with both coordinates and an address, 1,626 (99.8 percent) have a pin within 500 metres of their own address.
• Organizations with no region. 6 are nationwide coalitions or forums with no fixed premises, so no province is recorded. None was assigned arbitrarily, and they are therefore absent from the regional pages and from the density figures.

Source: The registers above and individual verification. The collection date is August 19, 2026.