Korea's oldest workplaces are its banks. Its youngest are building sites and coffee shops.

Give every Korean workplace an age — the years since it first appeared in the pension register — and average by industry, and you get a portrait of how each trade is structured. The old industries are institutions. The young ones are the churn.

The oldest trades

• Domestic banks — 33.3 years.
• Credit unions — 32.4.
• Wholesale liquor — 27.7.
• Then a drop, into the high teens: specialist waste haulage (18.9), metal-wire products (18.1), screen printing (17.2), industrial refrigeration (16.5).

Finance sits alone at the top, and it should: banks and credit unions are licensed, capital-heavy institutions that do not open and close. The old manufacturing trades below them are the survivors of Korea’s industrial base — plants that have been running for a generation.

One caveat sharpens rather than softens this: the register only goes back to the pension system’s 1988 inception, so any workplace older than that is capped at 38 years. Banks are exactly the industry that predates 1988 in force, so 33.3 years understates them — their true average is older. The ceiling makes the old industries look younger than they are, and they still top the table.

The youngest trades

• Earthmoving contractors — 2.3 years.
• Interior electrical wiring — 2.4.
• General electrical work — 2.5.
• Concrete and rebar — 2.7.
• Facility maintenance — 3.1.
• System-software development — 3.8.
• Coffee shops — 3.9.

The bottom of the list is two things: construction subtrades and the service economy’s fast-opening frontier. Construction firms are young because the trade runs on projects — companies form around a build and dissolve after, so the active population is always freshly registered. Coffee shops and software startups are young for the opposite reason: the trade is expanding, so its workplaces are new arrivals.

Why the age gap is really a structure gap

An industry’s average age is not about how good it is — it is about how it is built. Licensed institutions accrete age because barriers keep them standing. Project trades and open-entry services stay young because their whole model is formation and dissolution. Read the age column and you are reading which industries are fortresses and which are flows.

That distinction matters for everything downstream. The companion cut shows that the old, institutional industries also churn their workers least, and the young, project-based ones churn most — the age of the firms and the stability of the jobs move together. Age is the leading indicator; turnover is what it predicts.

What we did not claim

This is enrolment age, not founding age — a long-running firm that only recently registered a new workplace would read as young. It is also survivor-weighted: we count workplaces active in June 2026, so industries that open and close a lot have their closures invisible here, which if anything makes the young trades look older than their full turnover would suggest. The ranking is robust to both; the exact years carry the caveats.