Working for a Korean company pays a quarter more than working for an owner
The national pension bills every employer 9% of pay. Incorporated firms are billed 370,340 won per worker, sole proprietorships 280,520 — the 882,490 Koreans working for an individual owner sit a quarter below the 10.7 million at companies.
AI-assisted, human-reviewed sourcing. Figures are pulled programmatically from the official sources listed at the end of this article and checked by an editor before publication.
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There is a number about Korean work that no one fills in to look good: the bill an employer gets from the national pension every month, a flat 9% of each worker’s pay. Sort the whole workforce not by industry but by one plain fact — is your employer a company or a person — and a quarter of a paycheque separates the two.
A company pays more than an owner
Incorporated workplaces are billed 370,340 won per worker; sole proprietorships 280,520. Because the bill is a fixed share of pay, that gap is a pay gap: the 882,490 people who work for an individual owner — the corner store, the single-clinic practice, the family workshop — sit about a quarter below the 10.7 million who work for an incorporated company.
Why this measure, and not a survey
Pay surveys ask; this bill is collected. It lands whether the employer wants it seen or not, for almost every registered workplace in the country, which is why it can split 11.6 million people by their employer’s legal form without a sampling error. The trade-off is that it stops at the income ceiling and carries arrears, so it ranks pay rather than reading it — good enough to say a company pays a quarter more than an owner, not to print either as a salary.
What it cannot say is why. Legal form is not size, and an owner-run clinic is not a struggling shop. The data marks the line; it does not explain it. But the line is there, drawn by the one bill that arrives the same way for everyone.
Data & Verification Notes
- Data as of
- Sources
- National Pension Service (Korea) — Workplace subscriber file (가입 사업장 내역), month of record 2026-06
- Cross-checks
- The pension bill is a flat 9% of a worker's monthly pay, so the bill per subscriber tracks pay. Split every active workplace by whether it is an incorporated company or a sole proprietorship and the per-head bill is 370,340 won at incorporated workplaces and 280,520 at sole proprietorships
- The two groups cover 10.7 million subscribers at incorporated companies and 882,490 at sole proprietorships, out of the 11.6 million in the 2026-06 workplace file. The split is the workplace's own legal form, as filed, not an estimate
- The source file is Korean-Windows encoded (CP949/EUC-KR) and decoded before any field was read; withdrawn workplaces are dropped, not counted as zero. This is the same near-census file behind our industry pay ladder
- Excluded figures
- Any conversion of the bill into a won salary. The bill carries arrears and hits a ceiling, so inverting it would invent precision. This compares two groups on the same measure; it does not read either as a wage
- The 1.38 million subscribers at workplaces with no business-registration number, which are neither clearly incorporated nor clearly a sole proprietorship and are left out of this two-way split
- Whether an owner-run workplace is small by choice or by stage. The data marks legal form, not size or age, so it cannot say why the gap exists — only that it does
The full dataset behind these figures — every listed company, every row — is available to license. SeoulMarkets data for licence →
Not investment advice. SMarkets publishes data journalism for general information only. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security — any investment you make is at your own risk and responsibility. Figures are derived from official public data sources and may be revised by the issuing agency. Verify independently before acting.
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