Last updated: July 2026
You will be sent a link. Your employer sends one, your university sends one, a forum thread sends a third — and they are not the same website. Korea runs its entry and immigration services across separate portals that look official, sound similar, and share nothing with each other, not even your login.
This guide sorts out which site does what, which one you can use without an account, and how to tell the real ones from the copies that are actively taking people’s money.
TL;DR
- Korea runs four separate government sites, and none of them share a login.
- Before you fly: visa.go.kr for a visa, k-eta.go.kr if you are visa-free, e-arrivalcard.go.kr for the entry declaration that replaced the paper card.
- After you land: hikorea.go.kr for the residence card, extensions and office appointments.
- You cannot get a visa portal account. Sign-up and login are built for Korean sponsors and agencies, not for applicants.
- Status checking needs no login. The search form on visa.go.kr is open to anyone with a passport number.
- A K-ETA exemption runs to 31 December 2026, so many visa-free travellers currently skip that site entirely.
- If it does not end in .go.kr, it is not the government — however official the page looks.
The One Rule That Sorts All of This Out
Korea does not have a single immigration website. It has four, and they do not talk to each other. Creating an account on one gives you nothing on the others.
The dividing line is simpler than it looks: have you landed yet?
Before you fly
- visa.go.kr — applying for a visa, e-Visa, checking application status
- k-eta.go.kr — travel authorisation if your country is visa-free
- e-arrivalcard.go.kr — the entry declaration that replaced the paper arrival card
After you land
- hikorea.go.kr — residence card, extensions, address changes, office bookings
Almost every “the Korean immigration website is broken” complaint online is somebody on the wrong one of these four.
1. visa.go.kr — The Korea Visa Portal
Run by the Ministry of Justice. This is where a visa exists as a thing you apply for, before you have any status in Korea.
What lives here
- Visa Navigator — you pick your continent, country, purpose of entry and intended length of stay, and it tells you which visa category fits. It is the single most useful page on the site for anyone who does not already know their visa letter and number.
- Visa by Categories — the full list of statuses, from A-1 through H-2.
- Online Visa Application — the e-Visa route, where eligible.
- Visa Fees, Application Form downloads, and Find a Diplomatic Mission.
- Check Application Status — see below, this one matters.
What does not live here
Anything that happens after you arrive. There is no residence card application, no extension, no office appointment. Those are on HiKorea and only on HiKorea.
You Probably Cannot Get an Account Here
The site shows LOGIN and JOIN buttons at the top, which sends a lot of people into creating an account before they have worked out whether they need one. Most do not.
Click JOIN and the portal tells you outright: registration is meant for Korean companies and organisations that want to sponsor foreign nationals. It is a sponsor’s account, not an applicant’s account.
The login screen confirms it. There is no ordinary ID-and-password field anywhere on it. Every route in is institutional — a Korean digital certificate issued to a company, an equivalent certificate for educational institutions, or dedicated tabs for travel agencies, Visa Application Centres, administrative agencies and authorised agents. A foreign national sitting abroad has no way to obtain any of these, which makes the honest summary not “you don’t need an account” but “you cannot have one.”
If you are an individual applying for your own visa, your route is your embassy, consulate or a Korea Visa Application Centre — and the portal is a reference and status-checking tool you can use without signing in to anything. Browsing the visa categories, running the Visa Navigator and checking your application status all work logged out.
This is the sharpest contrast with HiKorea, where a login sits in front of nearly everything, including simply booking an appointment.
Checking Your Application Status Without an Account
This is the part worth knowing, because it is the one thing on any of these sites you can do in under a minute with nothing prepared.
Go to Check Application Status. There is no login wall — the search form is simply there. You pick which kind of application you made, then identify yourself:
- Type of application — six options: Diplomatic office, e-Visa (Individual), e-Visa (Group), Confirmation of Visa Issuance, Visa Application Center, or No Visa. Pick the one that matches how you actually applied. If you went to an embassy or consulate, that is Diplomatic office. If you used a KVAC centre, that is Visa Application Center.
- Identification — and this is the part to watch, because the form changes depending on which type you picked. For Diplomatic office, you get a dropdown and supply any one of passport number, application number or receipt number. For e-Visa (Individual), the form splits into two separate fields and asks for the application number and the passport number together.
- Name in English and Date of Birth, in every case.
The practical consequence: if you applied for an e-Visa, save your application number. Your passport number on its own will not get you into the status page, and there is no “forgot my application number” recovery on the search screen.
The name field is the usual trap. It wants the name exactly as it appears in the machine-readable zone — the two lines of monospaced text at the bottom of your passport photo page — not the name as printed in the main body. The portal shows a sample passport with the MRZ highlighted for precisely this reason. If your search returns nothing and you are certain of the passport number, the name format is almost always why. We covered the same MRZ problem in our guide to Korean name verification failures, because it breaks far more than visa lookups.
If you applied through an agency, check here yourself rather than taking the agency’s word for it. Korean embassies have issued warnings about exactly this: agencies producing forged confirmation documents while the real application was never filed.
The Half-English Problem
The portal has an English interface, and the top navigation, side menus and form labels are genuinely in English. Then you land on a page and the heading is in Korean rather than “Check Application Status & Print”, and the breadcrumb trail is Korean too.
This is normal and it is not a browser fault. The language switcher at the top offers Korean and Chinese — meaning you are already in English mode when this happens. Expect a mix: English structure, Korean headings, English instructions inside the form. Nothing is hidden from you, but do not conclude you have been kicked out of the English site.
2. k-eta.go.kr — The One You May Not Need
K-ETA is not a visa. It is a travel authorisation for people who do not need a visa. And right now, a large number of nationalities are excused from it entirely.
The Ministry of Justice has extended its temporary K-ETA exemption again, this time covering 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2026. Nationals of the countries already under the exemption — the United States among them — can board for Korea without applying for K-ETA at all.
Two things follow from that, and both matter.
Do not assume you need it. The exemption has been renewed every year since it was introduced in 2023, and it now covers a substantial share of the visa-free countries. Plenty of travellers pay for a K-ETA they did not have to buy.
Do not assume it lasts. This is a year-by-year measure, not a permanent policy change. The current extension ends on 31 December 2026. If you are reading this after that date, treat everything in this section as expired and check the site.
How to check your own case: the K-ETA application flow tells you. When you select an exempt nationality, the site displays a K-ETA exemption notice rather than taking your money. That is the authoritative answer for your passport, and it takes less than a minute.
You can still apply voluntarily, for a fee. There is one concrete reason to: an approved K-ETA exempts you from filling in the arrival card on landing. Whether that is worth the fee is your call — the queue it saves is short.
The trap here runs both ways. People who need a visa waste time on K-ETA; people who are visa-free try to apply for a visa they do not need. Establish which of the three groups you are in — visa required, K-ETA required, or exempt — before you open any site at all.
3. e-arrivalcard.go.kr — The Newest One
This site did not matter a year ago. It does now.
From 1 January 2026, Korea replaced the paper arrival card — the slip cabin crew used to hand out before landing — with an online entry declaration, the e-Arrival Card. It has its own government site and its own rules.
What you need to know
- It is free. The official portal charges nothing. Any site quoting a fee for this is not the government.
- You submit it shortly before travel, not months ahead: the portal opens submissions from three days before your arrival date.
- Individual and group filing are separate paths — individual covers 1–9 people, group covers larger parties and travel agencies.
- Not everyone has to file it. The portal has a navigator that asks what you already hold — a visa, a K-ETA, a residence card, or nothing — and tells you whether the declaration applies to you. Run it rather than guessing.
One officially confirmed exemption is worth knowing: an approved K-ETA covers you, and the exemption from filling in the arrival card is precisely the benefit the Ministry of Justice cites for exempt travellers who choose to apply for a K-ETA anyway. That is the calculation behind the K-ETA fee if you are exempt but travelling often.
If you already live in Korea and hold a residence card, run the navigator before you assume anything — the card is one of the options it asks about.
4. hikorea.go.kr — Everything After You Land
Once you are in Korea, visa.go.kr stops being relevant to your life and HiKorea takes over completely.
HiKorea handles the alien registration card, extensions of stay, changes of status, address and workplace reporting, and the appointment booking system for immigration offices. It is a different site with a different account system and a noticeably different design philosophy — where the visa portal lets you look around freely, HiKorea puts a login in front of almost everything, including appointment booking.
We have three guides on it already:
- Creating a HiKorea account and using the English site
- Booking an immigration office appointment
- Getting your residence card (ARC) after you arrive
Your visa portal account does not work here. You will make a new one.
Where Two Sites Touch: Confirmation of Visa Issuance
There is one process that genuinely spans both, and it confuses people every year.
A Confirmation of Visa Issuance is used when someone already in Korea — an employer, a university, a spouse — sponsors your visa from inside the country. The sponsor applies in Korea. Once it is granted, you take the confirmation number to a Korean embassy or consulate abroad and use it to get the visa stamped.
So the same case has a Korean-side step and an overseas step. When you check the status, this is the option to select under Type of application: Confirmation of Visa Issuance, not Diplomatic office — even though an embassy will eventually be involved.
If your employer says “we’ve applied for your visa” and you cannot find anything under Diplomatic office, try this option before assuming something has gone wrong.
The Fake-Site Problem
This section exists because the scam is well documented, actively running, and expensive.
Fraudulent websites impersonate both the Korea Visa Portal and K-ETA. They copy the Ministry of Justice layout, footer, address and helpline number, then charge applicants large fees for services that are free or cheap on the real site — or take the money and file nothing at all.
Korea Visa Application Centres — the government’s own authorised partners — publish named warnings about specific fraudulent domains, and Korean embassies have separately warned that scammers issue forged visa confirmation documents to victims who never had an application filed at all.
Do not rely on those lists, though. New clones appear faster than anyone can publish warnings about them, and some rank in search results above the real thing. Any list you read today, including one on a government page, is a snapshot.
So use the rule instead of the list.
Korean government sites end in .go.kr. Only four matter for entering and staying in Korea:
- www.visa.go.kr
- www.k-eta.go.kr
- www.e-arrivalcard.go.kr
- www.hikorea.go.kr
The arrival card portal carries its own impersonation warning on the front page, which tells you how quickly the clones follow a new government service.
Anything else is not the government. In particular, watch for hyphens standing in for the dots — a domain that swaps the dots for dashes reads almost identically at a glance and is not a government site. Check the part immediately before the first single slash, not the words in the middle of the address.
Two more habits worth having:
- Type the domain yourself rather than clicking a search result, at least the first time. Bookmark it after that.
- Government fees are modest and published. Visa fees are listed on the visa portal. If a site quotes you a figure far above the published fee, that gap is the scam.
Using a legitimate paid agency is a normal choice, especially for complex work visas. The point is not that agencies are bad — it is that you should be able to verify the outcome yourself on a .go.kr site, for free, without asking the agency.
Which Site Do I Need? A 30-Second Check
- I need a visa and I am outside Korea → visa.go.kr
- I do not know which visa I need → visa.go.kr, Visa Navigator
- My country is visa-free and I am visiting → k-eta.go.kr, but check first whether you are exempt
- I applied for a visa and want to know if it is approved → visa.go.kr, Check Application Status
- My Korean employer is sponsoring me → visa.go.kr, status type: Confirmation of Visa Issuance
- I am flying to Korea and there is no paper form any more → e-arrivalcard.go.kr, run the navigator first
- I have landed and need my residence card → hikorea.go.kr
- I need to extend my stay → hikorea.go.kr
- I moved apartment and must report it → hikorea.go.kr
- I need to book an immigration office visit → hikorea.go.kr
FAQ
Do I need to create an account on the Korea Visa Portal?
No — and as an individual you could not create one anyway. Sign-up is for Korean companies and organisations sponsoring foreign nationals, and every login route requires a Korean digital certificate or an agency credential. Everything an applicant needs works logged out.
Can I use my Korea Visa Portal login on HiKorea?
No. They are separate systems with separate accounts. You will register again on HiKorea after you arrive.
Do I need an account to check my visa application status?
No. The status search on visa.go.kr works without logging in — passport, application or receipt number, plus your English name and date of birth.
My status search returns nothing. Is my application lost?
Usually not. Check two things first: that you selected the right application type, and that your English name matches the machine-readable zone at the bottom of your passport photo page rather than the printed name above it.
I applied for an e-Visa and only have my passport number. Can I check my status?
Not on that screen. The e-Visa (Individual) search asks for the application number alongside the passport number. Keep the application number from your confirmation — there is no lookup for it on the status page.
Is K-ETA a visa?
No. It is a travel authorisation for people entering Korea visa-free. If you hold a visa, K-ETA is not your route.
Do I actually need a K-ETA?
Possibly not. A temporary exemption covering many visa-free countries runs to 31 December 2026. Select your nationality on the K-ETA site — if you are exempt, it says so instead of taking payment.
Should I apply for K-ETA even though I am exempt?
Only if you want to skip the arrival card at the airport. That is the practical benefit, and the application fee still applies.
What happened to the paper arrival card?
It was replaced by the online e-Arrival Card from 1 January 2026. The declaration is made at e-arrivalcard.go.kr, free of charge, from three days before your arrival date.
Do I have to file an e-Arrival Card?
Not necessarily. An approved K-ETA exempts you, and the portal’s own navigator asks what you hold — visa, K-ETA, residence card or nothing — and gives you the answer for your case.
The English pages keep showing Korean headings. Am I on the wrong version?
No. The visa portal is only partly translated. English navigation with Korean page headings is the normal state of the site.
How do I know a site is really the Korean government?
The domain ends in .go.kr. For entry to and residence in Korea, the only four that matter are visa.go.kr, k-eta.go.kr, e-arrivalcard.go.kr and hikorea.go.kr.
Who do I call if I am stuck?
1345, the Immigration Contact Center, from inside Korea. From abroad, +82-1345. It operates in multiple languages.
Official Resources
- Korea Visa Portal: https://www.visa.go.kr
- K-ETA: https://www.k-eta.go.kr
- e-Arrival Card: https://www.e-arrivalcard.go.kr
- HiKorea: https://www.hikorea.go.kr
- Immigration Contact Center: 1345 (from Korea) · +82-1345 (from abroad)
New here? Start with the HiKorea sign-up guide, or browse all guides.