Most guides for foreigners in Korea stop at 1345. That number is the Immigration Contact Center, and it is genuinely useful — for your visa, your ARC, your residence reporting. It is the wrong number for almost everything on this page.
If your employer has not paid you, if you want your pension contributions back before you fly home, if you are staring at a year-end tax form in Korean, or if you were hurt on the job, you are dealing with a different set of offices. Separate agencies, separate laws, separate hotlines — and in several cases English-language material that almost nobody tells foreigners exists.
Here is which door to knock on.
The rule that sorts all of it
One line divides the whole system, and once you see it the rest is easy.
Immigration decides whether you may stay. It has nothing to do with your money.
Your visa status and your financial rights sit under different ministries and different acts. Two consequences surprise people:
- 1345 cannot recover your unpaid wages. It will tell you so, politely, after you have waited on hold.
- Conversely — and this is the part worth internalising — some of these offices do not check your visa status before helping you. Work injury is the clearest case. We come back to it.
If you are not sure which side your problem sits on, our guide to the government sites for visas and entry covers the immigration side, and the emergency and helpline numbers covers the lines you call when something is happening right now. This page is the money side.
Tax — and the manuals nobody mentions
National Tax Service · nts.go.kr/english · English help line 1588-0560
Two things catch foreign residents out.
The first is that there are two different filings and people confuse them constantly. Year-end tax settlement is what your employer runs for you if you are on a payroll — you hand in deduction paperwork early in the year and the adjustment appears in a payslip. The global income tax return is what you file yourself, as a rule between 1 and 31 May, if you had income your employer did not withhold on: freelance work, a second job, rent you collect.
The second is the useful part. The NTS publishes free English material for foreigners every year, on the public site. The English section carries a year-end tax settlement manual for foreigners, a shorter Easy Guide version, and a guide to filing the global income tax return — that last one in English, Chinese and Vietnamese. There is also an individual income tax and benefit guide.
These are the government’s own documents, not a blog’s reading of them. If you read one thing before your first Korean tax season, read the Easy Guide.
There is also a flat-rate option available to some foreign employees as an alternative to the normal progressive brackets. We are deliberately not printing the rate or the eligibility window here: the provision has been amended, the sources that come up in English disagree with each other about how long it lasts, and the answer depends on when you first started working in Korea. Whether it beats the normal brackets is arithmetic on your own numbers, and choosing it means giving up deductions. Ask 1588-0560, or read the current-year Easy Guide. Do not take a number for this off a blog — including this one.
The detail almost nobody knows: the NTS runs a Taxpayer Service Center inside Incheon International Airport. If you are leaving with a tax question unresolved, that is a staffed counter rather than a phone queue.
For filing, Hometax (hometax.go.kr) is the main portal, and there is a separate site for foreign taxpayers at teht.hometax.go.kr.
Pension — the refund most English guides get wrong
National Pension Service · nps.or.kr · 1355
If you work on a Korean payroll, pension contributions come out of your salary. A very large number of English-language articles then tell you that you get it all back in a lump sum when you leave.
That is not the rule. Under Korean law the lump-sum refund is, as a starting point, not paid to foreign nationals. It is paid where one of a small set of exceptions applies. Korea’s plain-language legal information service states the principle directly: the refund runs on reciprocity, country by country.
The exceptions people qualify under are:
- your home country’s pension law provides an equivalent benefit to Korean nationals (reciprocity), or
- Korea and your home country have a social security agreement that specifically covers the lump-sum refund, or
- you hold one of the employment-permit statuses the act names — E-8, E-9 or H-2.
Whether your nationality qualifies is not something any guide can tell you, and one that gives you a confident yes is guessing. It turns on your country’s own law and on the text of a specific bilateral agreement. Call 1355 and ask about your nationality before you plan around the money.
The detail worth the section: where a refund is payable, the NPS operates an airport payment service at Incheon — you can collect before you fly rather than arranging an international transfer afterwards. If you are receiving it abroad instead, our guide to sending money out of Korea covers that side.
Unpaid wages — the complaint you can file online
Ministry of Employment and Labor · counselling 1350 · Labor Portal labor.moel.go.kr
Wage theft is the most common serious problem foreign workers here run into, and the system for it is more accessible than people expect.
1350 is the ministry’s counselling centre. Its own site states the line runs weekdays 09:00–18:00 and that the caller pays for the call.
The formal step is a jinjeong — a complaint asking the labour office to make your employer pay. You can file it online through the Labor Portal, or in person at the labour office covering your workplace. A labour inspector is assigned to investigate. Filing costs nothing.
Bring or upload everything you have: employment contract, attendance records, payslips, bank statements showing what did and did not arrive. Documentation decides these cases.
One provision specific to employment-permit workers: the employer must take out wage-arrears guarantee insurance within 15 days of the employment contract taking effect. If the business collapsed, that insurance is a separate route to part of what you are owed.
Work injury — the law does not check your visa
Korea Workers’ Compensation and Welfare Service (COMWEL) · comwel.or.kr
Read this section even if you think it does not apply to you.
Industrial accident compensation insurance covers injury and illness arising from work. Benefits under the Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance Act include medical care, temporary disability, permanent disability and nursing benefits.
And here is what matters: Korean legal interpretation treats foreign workers as covered by the industrial accident act regardless of whether their stay is authorised. The interpretation moved to that position in October 1992 and has held since. Being out of status does not, by itself, put you outside the scheme.
That does not make an unauthorised stay safe or advisable — immigration consequences are a separate matter under a separate ministry, and this page is not advice about them. But if you are hurt at work and someone tells you that you have no claim because of your visa, that is not a correct statement of the compensation law.
Free legal help, consumer and financial disputes
Three narrower doors, all free.
Korea Legal Aid Corporation — klac.or.kr · 132. Free legal counselling and, if you meet the income test, representation. Wage cases are core work for them. Korea’s legal information service points people to their nearest KLAC office for exactly this.
Korea Consumer Agency — 1372. Disputes with a business: a deposit not returned, a contract you were pressured into, a service never delivered.
Financial Supervisory Service — fss.or.kr/fss/eng. Complaints about a bank, insurer or card company. The FSS runs an English site. If your problem is with a bank account itself rather than a dispute, our guide to opening a Korean bank account may solve it faster.
The one table
| Office | Handles | Line | Site |
|---|---|---|---|
| National Tax Service | Income tax, year-end settlement | 1588-0560 | nts.go.kr/english |
| National Pension Service | Contributions, lump-sum refund | 1355 | nps.or.kr |
| Employment and Labor | Unpaid wages, dismissal | 1350 | labor.moel.go.kr |
| COMWEL | Work injury compensation | see site | comwel.or.kr |
| Korea Legal Aid Corporation | Free legal counsel | 132 | klac.or.kr |
| Korea Consumer Agency | Disputes with a business | 1372 | — |
| Financial Supervisory Service | Bank, insurer, card complaints | see site | fss.or.kr/fss/eng |
For health insurance, which is its own agency again, see our Korean health insurance guide.
What we could not verify
We check numbers against the body that issues them. Several of these agencies block access from outside Korea, so rather than quietly printing something we could not confirm, here is what we left out:
- COMWEL’s and the FSS’s phone numbers. COMWEL’s site would not respond to us at all, and the number we expected on the FSS English site was not on it. Use the websites, or ask 1350 to point you.
- The flat-rate tax figures. Explained above — amended provision, disagreeing sources, and it depends on your own start date.
- How many countries have a refund agreement with Korea. Widely repeated online, never from the NPS. Ask 1355 about your country specifically.
- Exactly which languages 1350 answers in. Sources disagree.
If you find one of these confirmed on an official Korean site, tell us and we will update the page.
FAQ
Is 1345 useless for these problems? Not useless — it is a reasonable first call if you truly do not know which office owns your problem, and it operates in many languages. But it will route you elsewhere. Wages go to 1350; pension to 1355.
Do I file a tax return if my employer already did the year-end settlement? Usually not, if payroll income is all you had. The May return is for income your employer did not withhold on.
Will claiming any of this affect my visa? Filing a wage complaint or an injury claim is exercising a right under labour law, run by a different ministry from immigration. If your situation is complicated, that is a question for a lawyer — KLAC counselling is free.
Can I get my pension money back when I leave? Only under one of the exceptions above. Confirm with 1355 for your nationality before you count on it.
I am out of status. Can I still report unpaid wages or an injury? The compensation law’s coverage does not turn on your visa status, as above. The immigration consequences are a separate question we are not able to advise on — talk to KLAC first.
Official Resources
- National Tax Service — English site — foreigner tax manuals and the Easy Guide
- Hometax — the main filing portal
- Hometax for foreign taxpayers — separate site for foreign taxpayers
- National Pension Service — contributions and lump-sum refund
- 1350 — Ministry of Employment and Labor counselling — weekdays 09:00-18:00, caller pays
- Labor Portal — file an unpaid-wage complaint online
- Korea Legal Aid Corporation — free legal counselling, 132
- Financial Supervisory Service — English site — bank, insurer and card complaints
- Easy Law — Korea’s plain-language legal information service