Indicators and scope

Population bases

Immigration statistics in Korea count different populations depending on the ministry and the survey. The names are similar and the counts differ widely.

Note: The four definitions contain or overlap one another. Table 1 on the home page gives the four counts with their years and coverage. The default definition is registered foreigners, and any table on another basis names that basis in the source line.

Indicators

Source: The indicators were computed from Open dataset.

Note: The code used for the calculations is in the repository pipeline.

Data limits

• Individual-level tracking The yearbook recounts the population every year. How many years one person stayed, and where that person moved from and to, cannot be learned from this source.
• Region and nationality of foreigners without status Only the national total is published, so these people appear in no cell of the district reports or the nationality reports.
• Language demand estimates A value calculated by applying the first-language shares of Ethnologue's mother-tongue shares applied to the nationality composition. This is not a count of actual interpretation requests, and a person who uses two languages cannot be separated out. Because several mother tongues are used within one country, the languages split into as many as 1,361, and the sum of people by language does not equal the number of registered foreigners.
• The basis for age and sex These two items alone use the staying foreigner definition. The yearbook does not publish them on a registration basis, so the definitions cannot be aligned, and a share computed by mixing counts from the two definitions is wrong.
• Causes The tables and figures show where people are and how many. Whether a decline in one district reflects a change in industry or a move to a neighboring district, and whether a status is concentrated in one district because of jobs, cannot be separated with the yearbook.
• The unit of the status of stay A status attaches to a condition of stay, and it does not attach to a person. When the same person moves to a different status some years later, the count appears on a different row, so reading the number by status as a cumulative count of people who entered on that status gives the wrong figure.
• Nature of the support organization list This is not an official statistic. It is a list assembled from several portals and registers, so organizations may be missing, and contact details are what each organization published. The list itself is at Service map.

Scope

• District250 districts
• Nationality192
• Statuses of stay and families35
• Estimated first language1,361
• Map years2008–2025
• Open dataset17 files, 1,166,660 rows

Note: The year range differs by indicator. Provinces start in 2006, districts in 2008, and sub-districts in 2014. The years used on each page are in the source line.

Support organization list

1,893 organizations support immigrants. 1,412 list a telephone number, 1,785 have an address, 1,129 have a confirmed website and 993 have a confirmed social media account.

Source

Collected from 41 rosters, then de-duplicated by name, address and phone number. The 12 rosters with the most organizations are listed.

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.
• Addresses. All 1,785 addresses were submitted to the national address search; 1,748 (97.9 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 1,785 organizations with both coordinates and an address, 1,785 (100.0 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.