Section
Macro
Growth, prices, employment and the external balance.
In Korea, bigger employers pay more — and the pension data shows it rising at every single step.
Sort 554,570 workplaces by headcount and the national-pension bill per worker climbs monotonically: 291,760 won at the smallest firms, 456,315 at the largest. No band breaks the ladder. The size premium is 1.56x.
In one Korean province, workers leave the payroll fastest — and it pays the least.
Each month a share of enrolled workers drops out of workplace pension coverage. On the tourism island of Jeju it is 4.28%; in research-heavy Daejeon, 3.12%. Across regions, higher pay and lower churn move together.
The older an industry's firms, the fewer workers it loses. In Korea the link is strong.
Across 105 industries, average firm age and monthly separation rate move inversely, with a correlation of -0.61. Banks are old and stable; construction is young and churns. Stability, it turns out, has an age.
Korea's oldest workplaces are its banks. Its youngest are building sites and coffee shops.
Measured by years enrolled in the pension system, domestic banks average 33 and credit unions 32. Earthmoving and electrical-wiring contractors average barely two. An industry's age maps how it is built.
Korea's pay map doesn't put Seoul on top. A shipbuilding city does.
Averaged across every enrolled workplace, the national-pension bill is highest in Ulsan, not the capital. Top to bottom, the regional spread is just 1.21x — the smallest of the axes that move Korean pay.
Korea's smallest firms lose workers 1.6x as fast as its largest. The pay ladder runs the other way.
Each month, small workplaces shed 4.29% of their enrolled workers; the biggest shed 2.66%. Hiring falls with size too. The firm that pays the most also holds onto people the longest.
Six in ten formally employed Koreans work in the capital region. It barely pays more.
The Seoul metro area holds 61.2% of enrolled workers on a footprint that pays a 1.21x premium at most — and less than that once the pension ceiling and Seoul's rents are taken into account. The pull isn't the paycheque.
Korea's pension bill sorts 11.6 million workers into a pay ladder. Top to bottom, 2.3 times.
Every employer is billed 9% of a worker's pay for the national pension, up to a ceiling. Rank Korea's 41 biggest industries by that bill per head and imaging-equipment plants sit 2.3 times above employment agencies.
Korea publishes two housing numbers. They routinely disagree, and both are right.
Transaction records say what actually sold. The official index says which way the market moved. In a thin market these diverge — and the gap is the story, not an error in either.
Why the Korean market numbers you can legally read are always a day old
The data this site publishes settles on a one-business-day lag — not by editorial choice but because that is what the redistributable sources release. One exception changes what is possible.