Korean men now carry 14% more mortgage debt than women — in 2013 the gap was 1%

Korea’s household debt is counted and recounted — ₩2019.8 trillion of household credit as of 2026Q2, up from ₩464.7 trillion in 2002. What almost nobody counts in English is who is carrying it. The Bank of Korea publishes one split that answers part of that question, and in thirteen years it has moved a long way.

The number

Mortgage balance per borrower, 2026Q2:

The same table thirteen years earlier, 2013Q1:

In 2013 a male and a female mortgage borrower in Korea owed within about a million won of each other. Today the difference is roughly what a small new car costs.

It did not jump — it crept

The gap is not the product of one policy or one year. It is a slope.

Across the 53 quarterly steps in the series the ratio rose in 47 and fell in 6 — and the six falls were tiny, the largest barely a thousandth. There is no quarter where the trend breaks. Both sides grew; men’s balances simply grew faster, plus 85.8% against plus 65.1%, with the all-borrower average up 77.7%.

What this does not say

This is the part that coverage of a number like this usually skips, so we are putting it before the interpretation rather than after it.

• It is per borrower, not per household. A married couple with a single mortgage in one name appears once, on that one side of the table. That alone can move a sex split without anyone’s housing changing.
• It says nothing about who owns the home, who pays the instalment, or who lives there. A loan balance is a loan balance.
• It is a stock, not a flow. Someone who borrowed in 2015 and has not moved since is still in this average every quarter.
• The Bank of Korea does not publish, in this table, how many borrowers are on each side. So we cannot tell you whether the gap comes from men taking larger loans or from the mix of who borrows at all having changed. We looked for that split, it is not there, and we are not going to guess at it.

A reader who wants one sentence from this should take the narrow one: the average Korean mortgage held by a man has grown faster than the average mortgage held by a woman, in all but six quarters out of fifty-three. Why that is true is a separate question, and this table does not answer it.

For context, the rest of the tape

Household credit, the broadest official measure, stands at ₩2019.8 trillion in 2026Q2. Bank loan delinquency of one month or more sits at 0.4% on household loans in July 2026, against 0.8% on corporate loans and 1.9% on credit-card loans. By that measure the stress in Korean credit right now is not in mortgages.

For who actually holds Korea’s household debt — and why the bank-versus-non-bank split has moved less than most coverage assumes — see Korea’s household debt quadrupled in 24 years, and who holds it barely changed. For the repayment side, see Korea’s credit stress is in companies, not households.

Figures are from the Bank of Korea’s ECOS statistical service, tables 181Y012, 151Y001 and 901Y124, retrieved 2026-10-04. The per-borrower series is published in units of ₩100,000; we converted to millions of won and show one decimal. Not investment advice.