South Korea Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

WHAT A PAYROLL ENGINE GETS WRONG IN SOUTH KOREA. 1. THE 9% NATIONAL PENSION RATE IS DEAD, AND EVERY STORED KOREAN PAYROLL TABLE PREDATING 2026 IS NOW WRONG. The reform Act promulgated on 20 March 2025 amended 국민연금법 art. 88 to raise the rate from 9% to 13% in eight annual steps of 0.5 percentage points, the first taking effect on 1 January 2026. 2026 is 9.5% (4.75% each side). The rate will move again every January to 2033. This must be modelled as a year-keyed schedule; a constant is guaranteed to be wrong within twelve months. 2. LONG-TERM CARE IS LEVIED ON THE HEALTH PREMIUM, NOT ON SALARY, AND THIS NESTING IS THE COMMONEST STRUCTURAL ERROR IN KOREAN PAYROLL. The statutory 2026 rate is 13.14% OF THE HEALTH-INSURANCE PREMIUM. Applied to gross pay it would over-deduct roughly fourteenfold. The salary-equivalent figure is 0.9448% total (0.4724% each side), being 7.19% × 13.14%. Because it is a product of two independently-set rates, it must be RECOMPUTED whenever either input moves — and in January 2026 BOTH moved: care 12.95%→13.14%, health 7.09%→7.19%. An engine that patched only one input produces a plausible but wrong number. 3. THREE OF THE FOUR INSURANCES ROSE ON 1 JANUARY 2026, AND A FOURTH LEVY ROSE 50%. Pension 9→9.5%, health 7.09→7.19%, long-term care 0.9182→0.9448% of salary, wage-claim guarantee levy 0.06→0.09%. Employment insurance and the industrial-accident average (1.47%) were the only things held flat. A single "2025 rates" table is wrong on four of seven lines. 4. THE PENSION CEILING MOVES ON 1 JULY; EVERYTHING ELSE MOVES ON 1 JANUARY. 기준소득월액 limits are re-notified each year with effect from the July premium month, tracking the A값. For 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027 the ceiling is 6,590,000 won and the floor 410,000 won (previously 6,370,000 and 400,000). An engine that refreshes all Korean parameters every January will be running a stale pension ceiling for six months of every year. 5. THE HEALTH CEILING IS A PREMIUM AMOUNT, NOT A WAGE CEILING. The notice caps the monthly 보수월액보험료 at 9,183,480 won for 2026 (employee 4,591,740) and floors it at 20,160 won. There is no notified wage ceiling to store; the implied one is the premium cap divided by the current rate and changes whenever either number moves. This is why the health branch carries no ceiling_monthly field while the pension branch does — the difference is real, not an omission. 6. PENSION AND HEALTH ARE CAPPED; EMPLOYMENT, ACCIDENT AND THE WAGE-CLAIM LEVY ARE NOT. Employment insurance, industrial accident insurance and the wage-claim guarantee levy all run on uncapped 보수총액. For a very high earner the employment-insurance deduction keeps growing after the pension deduction has frozen at 313,025 won, which inverts the usual intuition that the biggest branch produces the biggest deduction. 7. FOUR DIFFERENT BASES WEAR SIMILAR NAMES AND ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE. 기준소득월액 (pension: last year's income, banded, fixed for a July–June cycle), 보수월액 (health: annualised remuneration, reconciled each April), 보수총액 (employment, accident and wage-claim levy: actual total remuneration paid), and 소득월액 (the health surcharge on non-employment income, billed to the individual and absent from employer payroll). Computing one and reusing it across branches is wrong in several directions at once. 8. THE EMPLOYER'S EMPLOYMENT-INSURANCE RATE IS STEPPED BY HEADCOUNT. Employee 0.9% flat; employer 0.9% plus a 고용안정·직업능력개발사업 levy of 0.25% (under 150 employees), 0.45% (150+ priority-support enterprise), 0.65% (150 to under 1,000) or 0.85% (1,000+, and the State and local governments). Employer total therefore runs 1.15% to 1.75% against a fixed employee 0.9%. Headcount is tested on the employer as a whole, not per worksite. 9. INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENT INSURANCE HAS A 37-FOLD SPREAD AND A MANDATORY ADD-ON EVERYONE FORGETS. 28 industry categories from 5/1,000 (finance and insurance) to 185/1,000 (coal mining and quarrying), plus a flat 0.6/1,000 commuting-accident component that applies to EVERY industry and must be added to the table rate. An office employer at 6/1,000 pays 6.6/1,000. The 1.47% headline average already includes the commuting component — do not add it twice to the average. 10. THE WAGE-CLAIM GUARANTEE LEVY IS A REAL BRANCH AND IS USUALLY MISSING ENTIRELY. 0.09% of 보수총액 from 2026, employer-only, collected with the accident premium. Models that stop at the "4대보험" omit it. It is also volatile — cut from 0.08% to 0.06% a few years ago, and now raised to 0.09% — so it should be re-verified annually. 11. APRIL PAYSLIPS CARRY A LARGE HEALTH-INSURANCE ADJUSTMENT AND IT IS NOT AN ERROR. Health premiums are levied provisionally on the prior year's 보수월액 and trued up each April (연말정산) against pay actually received. Employees who were promoted mid-year receive a substantial one-off April charge; leavers can receive a refund. An engine that treats the April figure as the new run-rate will misproject the rest of the year. 12. EMPLOYEE CONTRIBUTIONS ARE TAX-RELIEVED, BUT NOT ALL BY THE SAME MECHANISM. National pension contributions are deducted in full as 연금보험료공제; health, long-term care and employment insurance come in as 특별소득공제. Both reduce taxable income, so Korean income tax is computed on pay after social insurance. SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: NONE. All four insurances and the wage-claim levy are national, administered by national bodies (국민연금공단, 국민건강보험공단, 근로복지공단), with identical rates in every province and metropolitan city. There is no provincial or municipal payroll tax. The only rate differentiation in the system is by INDUSTRY (the accident tariff) and by EMPLOYER SIZE (the employment-stabilisation levy), never by location. Do not model KR-11/KR-26/etc. as rate dimensions. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON, DELIBERATELY. 산재보험 EMPLOYER RATE AS A SINGLE FIGURE — rate_employer stays null. There is no national rate; it is set per industry category. The complete 28-row 2026 table IS served in the branch notes, read directly off the Ministry's own notice, together with the commuting-accident add-on, so the refusal is confined to the single-number question and nothing is withheld. THE 개별실적요율 (EXPERIENCE-RATED) ACCIDENT ADJUSTMENT — not modelled. It is applied to an individual employer by the Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Service on that employer's own claims history and cannot be derived from public data. THE 소득월액보험료 (HEALTH SURCHARGE ON NON-EMPLOYMENT INCOME) — not priced as a branch. It is billed directly to the individual, borne wholly by them, and never passes through employer payroll, so including it as a contribution branch would wrongly imply a payroll obligation. Its cap is the same 4,591,740 won a month that applies to the salary premium. 우선지원대상기업 CLASSIFICATION — not resolved here. Whether a 150-or-more-employee firm falls in the 0.45% or the 0.65% employment-stabilisation step turns on an industry-specific size test in the Employment Insurance Act Enforcement Decree that must be applied to the individual employer. ALREADY LEGISLATED, NOT YET IN FORCE / WATCH LIST. (1) THE PENSION RATE IS ON A LEGISLATED ESCALATOR — 9.5% in 2026, rising 0.5 percentage points every 1 January to reach 13% in 2033. This is already law, so 2027's 10% is not a forecast. Re-verify each January that the step has been applied as scheduled. (2) The 소득대체율 (income replacement rate) rose from 41.5% to 43% from 2026 under the same reform; it affects benefits, not contributions, and nothing in this record depends on it. (3) 기준소득월액 limits are re-notified every year with effect from 1 July — a June–July re-check is mandatory. (4) Health and long-term-care rates are decided by their respective committees in the autumn for the following January; the 2027 rates should be expected around November 2026. (5) The industrial-accident tariff is re-notified every 31 December for the following 1 January, and the 2026 notice held the average flat at 1.47% — do not assume that stability continues. (6) The wage-claim guarantee levy was re-notified in December 2025 and has moved twice in recent years. SOURCING CAVEATS. Everything served is read from a primary instrument, a ministry notice, or a ministry press release. Residual limits, stated plainly: the complete 2026 industrial-accident tariff was extracted directly from the 별지 attachment to 고용노동부고시 제2025-91호 as published on the National Law Information Centre, and the per-mille figures and the 0.6/1,000 commuting rate are exact. The long-term-care rate of 13.14% and the salary-equivalent 0.9448% are quoted from the Ministry of Health and Welfare's own press release on the 장기요양위원회 decision. The 2026 health rate of 7.19%, the premium cap of 9,183,480 won and the floor of 20,160 won are taken from the National Health Insurance Service's published 2026 figures as reported in the national press on the day of publication rather than from the text of the 고시 itself, which I could not render; the arithmetic is self-consistent with the 13.14% care rate producing exactly 0.9448%, which is a useful cross-check. The pension escalator and the 9.5% 2026 rate are confirmed from the National Pension Service and multiple official channels, but I did not open the text of the amending Act. The 기준소득월액 limits of 6,590,000 and 410,000 won applicable from 1 July 2026 are from the Ministry of Health and Welfare notice as reported; I did not open the notice text. The four employment-stabilisation steps are the long-standing Enforcement Decree figures, unchanged for 2026. Employee and employer shares are stated separately: the employee figure is what leaves the payslip, the employer figure is cost of employment and is not a deduction.

Get it programmatically

curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/kr/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/kr/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://asiaref.dev/provenance/kr/social-contributions

Other South Korea series: Bank of Korea Base Rate · Statutory interest (법정이율) · Value-Added Tax (부가가치세) standard rate · VAT registration threshold · National minimum wage (최저임금) · Public holidays · Consumer price inflation (소비자물가 상승률) · Corporate income tax (법인세) top rate · Withholding tax rates · Personal income tax (종합소득세) schedule

The same figure elsewhere: Sri Lanka · Taiwan · Thailand · Türkiye · United Arab Emirates · all 28