South Korea VAT registration threshold

What this value means

REFUSAL — Korea fixes no VAT registration threshold; this record deliberately serves a null value. Article 8(1) of the Value-Added Tax Act obliges every 사업자 (business operator) to register within 20 days of commencing business, per place of business, irrespective of turnover. There is no de minimis, no small-supplier exclusion and no registration floor. The two figures commonly mis-served as 'Korea's VAT threshold' — KRW 104,000,000 and KRW 48,000,000 — are not registration thresholds: both presuppose a business that is already registered. Standard VAT rate is 10%. PERIOD BASIS: none for registration — the trigger is the act of commencing business (registration may also be filed in advance). The KRW 104,000,000 figure is the SIMPLIFIED TAXPAYER (간이과세자) ceiling: 법 제61조제1항 fixes only a range (KRW 80,000,000 to 130% thereof) and delegates the operative figure to the Enforcement Decree; 시행령 제109조제1항 sets it at 1억4백만원 (KRW 104,000,000), raised from 80,000,000 by the Decree amendment of 29 February 2024 with effect from the 1 July 2024 determination window. VERIFIED UNMOVED: the Decree in force at confirmation (대통령령 제36133호, 27 February 2026) still reads 1억4백만원. The test is the preceding CALENDAR year's 공급대가 (VAT-inclusive consideration), and the resulting status runs a 1 July to 30 June window (법 제62조). Crossing converts the taxpayer from 간이과세자 to general taxpayer from the following 1 July — it creates no registration duty because the business is registered either way. NON-ESTABLISHED SUPPLIERS: NIL — tax from the first taxable supply, and none of the domestic reliefs apply. A foreign supplier WITH a domestic place of business registers under Article 8 like any resident. One WITHOUT a domestic place of business does not register for ordinary supplies: 법 제52조제1항 shifts the liability to the Korean recipient by withholding at payment — excluding a recipient who applies the service to its own taxable business, but INCLUDING recipients whose input tax is non-deductible under Article 39 (consumers, exempt businesses, financial institutions, government). Goods are taxed at importation (법 제50조). Where supply runs through a domestic agent or business place, 법 제53조 treats that person as the supplier. A nonresident can never be a 간이과세자 — Article 61(1) confines the regime to an 개인사업자 (individual entrepreneur). IMPORTED DIGITAL SERVICES: separate regime, NO threshold. 법 제53조의2제1항 requires a 국외사업자 supplying 전자적 용역 (electronic services — games, audio/video, software, advertising placement, cloud computing, brokerage) into Korea to complete 간편사업자등록 (simplified registration) within 20 days of commencing business, with no turnover condition. B2B is CARVED OUT, not zero-rated: supplies to a person already tax-registered for their taxable or exempt business fall to the Article 52 reverse charge instead. Article 53-2(2) deems the PLATFORM the supplier where the service reaches Korea through an open market or payment-collecting intermediary, putting the same 20-day duty on the platform. A simplified registrant deducts almost no input tax, keeps records five years, and must answer NTS transaction-statement demands within 60 days. Traps: (1) Serving KRW 104,000,000 as a registration threshold is wrong — it is the simplified-regime ceiling; a business under it is still registered and still files. (2) Serving KRW 48,000,000 is wrong twice over: 법 제69조제1항 is a PAYMENT waiver for simplified taxpayers whose current-period 공급대가 is under 48,000,000 — not a registration or filing waiver, measured on the CURRENT tax period, available only inside the simplified regime. (3) The three figures use different bases and periods: registration = no measure; 104,000,000 = preceding calendar year; 48,000,000 = current period. (4) All figures are 공급대가 (VAT-inclusive), not net supply value — comparing net turnover overstates headroom ~10%. (5) Sector carve-out: real-estate leasing and taxable entertainment venues keep a 48,000,000 simplified ceiling, not 104,000,000 (시행령 제109조제2항, 시행규칙 제71조) — numerically colliding with but legally distinct from the payment waiver. (6) Article 61(1) covers only individual entrepreneurs: every corporation — and every foreign entity — is a general taxpayer from day one at any turnover. (7) 시행령 제109조제2항 excludes long activity lists from simplified taxation regardless of size (mining, manufacturing, wholesale, real-estate dealing, professional services, construction and more) — applying the headline figure without the exclusion list misclassifies most B2B suppliers. (8) A successor to a general taxpayer's business is excluded from simplified status even below the figure. (9) The binding number lives in the Enforcement Decree, changeable by Presidential Decree alone within the statutory range — monitor the Decree, not the Act. (10) There is no digital-services threshold: the first B2C sale triggers simplified registration within 20 days. (11) Platform liability: where an open market or payment-collecting intermediary is involved the PLATFORM is deemed supplier — the underlying seller may have no Korean duty at all. (12) The Article 52 reverse charge is not universal for B2B: it switches off where the recipient applies the service to its own taxable business and back on where input tax is blocked.

Get it programmatically

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

Other South Korea series: Bank of Korea Base Rate · Statutory interest (법정이율) · Value-Added Tax (부가가치세) standard rate · 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 · Statutory social-insurance contributions

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