SeoulMarkets · open trade data
Korea trade dataset — every partner, every month
243 partner countries · 12 months (2025-08 to 2026-07) · CSV
Korea's customs office publishes what the country sells to, and buys from, every partner on earth, month by month. It publishes it in Korean, un-normalised, one awkward query at a time. We take the same official figures and hand you one clean CSV: 243 partner countries × 12 months of exports, imports and the balance, in English, with the source named on the first line. It is free to download and yours to keep — the raw customs record stays free.
- What it is — exports, imports and trade balance (USD thousand) for all 243 partner countries, for each of 12 months, 2025-08 to 2026-07. Plus national totals. One CSV.
- Why trust it — every figure is the customs value as filed, taken from Statistics Korea (KOSIS table DT_1R11006, source: Korea Customs Service). We parse, normalise and translate; we do not adjust the numbers.
- How current — monthly, following the customs release. Figures are provisional and get revised; the latest month is the least settled. We say so, in the file.
- The honest limits — this is partner-country × month, not HS-code (product) level. Hong Kong includes entrepôt re-exports onward to mainland China. Goods trade, customs basis — not the current account.
- What it is not — not investment advice, and not a forecast. It is the record.
What you get
| Rows | 2928 — 243 partners + national total, × 12 months |
|---|---|
| Columns | country_en, month, exports_usd_thousand, imports_usd_thousand, balance_usd_thousand |
| Window | 2025-08 to 2026-07 (12 months) |
| Format | UTF-8 CSV, source and licence on the header lines |
| Same data as | our API /v1/trade/exports — one source, they cannot disagree |
What this kind of data costs elsewhere
Nobody sells this as a one-off. The people who carry Korean trade data sell a whole platform, by subscription, or ask you to call. We opened them and wrote down the numbers:
| Where | Price | What that buys |
|---|---|---|
| data.go.kr / KOSIS (the raw source) | Free | Korean, un-normalised, one query at a time |
| Trading Economics — website | $29–199 / month | Whole platform, subscription, not this dataset |
| Trading Economics — API | $149–299 / month | Subscription, billed yearly |
| Statista | $199+ / month (billed yearly) | No one-off; subscription only |
| Nasdaq Data Link premium | Contact sales | À la carte, no public price |
The raw source is free, and so is our clean extract — you can take it right now, below. When we package the value-added product (curated time series, charts and written analysis), this is the market we will price it against. We will not name a price until that product exists.
What is already done for you, versus doing it yourself
The CSV above is free, and it stays free. But it did not arrive that way — KOSIS publishes this as Korean-language tables, one country and one month at a time. Here is what that work looks like, counted:
| Task | Doing it yourself from KOSIS | Already done in this CSV |
|---|---|---|
| Country names | Korean names, official codes — 243 separate lookups to get English | 243 partner countries pre-mapped to English names |
| Assembling the series | One query per country per month —2928 queries to match this file's row count | One file, already joined |
| Column names | Korean field labels, several table layouts across releases | One fixed schema: country_en, month, exports_usd_thousand, imports_usd_thousand, balance_usd_thousand |
| Keeping it current | Re-pull and re-join by hand every month | Refreshed on the customs release, same schema each time |
What is not yet built is the next layer — product (HS-code) detail, a longer back-series, and written month-to-month analysis on top of these figures. That is the processed product below, and it does not exist yet — we are not describing a sample of something we have not made.
Take the data — it is free
All 243 partner countries × 12 months, one CSV, or query it live through the API. No charge, no subscription.
Ask to be notified — the processed product
A packaged, value-added layer on top of this free data — product (HS-code) detail, a longer back-series, and written analysis — is in preparation. It is not on sale, and there is no button to press. Leave an email and we send the sample the day it exists, plus the terms at that time. No account, and this is not the newsletter.
Source: Statistics Korea (KOSIS), table DT_1R11006 — Korea Customs Service. Licence: Korea Public Data Portal, commercial use permitted with attribution. We parse, normalise and translate; figures are the customs values as filed. Not investment advice.