For two and a half years, South Korea’s digital nomad visa was a pilot. As of 30 June 2026, it is permanent — and the rules that became permanent are not the rules the pilot ran on.
If you read a guide written before July 2026, it is now wrong in three specific ways: the maximum stay, the income threshold, and who qualifies for the lower one. This guide covers the version that actually exists now. For how the F-1-D sits among Korea’s other visa options, see our complete guide to Korean visas.
The short version: you can stay up to three years, you need to earn a multiple of Korea’s per-capita income that now depends on your age and where you live, and if you are young and willing to base yourself outside Seoul, that multiple drops by half.
What the F-1-D actually is
It is a visa for people who already have work — remote work, for a company outside Korea — and want to do that work from Korea for an extended period.
That “outside Korea” part is the whole design. You keep your foreign employment and your foreign income. You are not entering the Korean labour market, not taking a job a Korean could hold, not paying into the system as a local employee. You are bringing income earned elsewhere and spending it here. The government’s interest is your spending, not your labour.
This is why the requirements look the way they do: proof of an ongoing contract with a foreign entity, proof of income, private medical insurance, a clean record — and no Korean employer anywhere in the process, because there isn’t one.
The three changes that matter
Maximum stay rose from two years to three. Under the pilot you got one year, extendable once, and then you were done. Now you can extend to a maximum of three years — issued one year at a time. The government has been explicit about why: it wants nomads who like Korea enough to consider staying, and three years is long enough to form that intention.
The income requirement is no longer flat. The pilot asked everyone for the same thing: twice Korea’s per-capita GNI, regardless of who you were. With the 2025 GNI figure at ₩52,416,000, that is roughly ₩104.8 million a year. That number still applies to the default case.
But age and location can now cut it in half. This is the real news. If you are aged 18 to 34 and base yourself in a non-capital-region or population-declining area, you need only one times GNI — roughly ₩52.4 million. Between the two poles, the Ministry applies a sliding scale within the one-to-two-times range based on age and region.
Read those together and the visa has a clear target now. It is not just “wealthy remote worker.” It is “younger remote worker willing to live somewhere other than Seoul.”
Why the rules bend this way: a problem in the data
When the Ministry published its pilot results, one number explained the entire redesign.
Of the 398 nomads registered in Korea as of May 2026, 340 — about 85% — were living in the capital region. Seoul, Gyeonggi, Incheon.
That is the opposite of what the programme was for. A digital nomad visa is a regional-tourism instrument. The whole pitch to local governments — the workation centres, the long-stay packages — assumes the nomads spread out. Instead they clustered in the one region that least needs the help.
The income rule is the correction. By making Seoul expensive to qualify for (full 2× GNI) and the provinces cheap (1× GNI for the young), the government is pricing the behaviour it wants. Whether it works is the open question of the next two years — but you can now see the machine’s intent in its numbers.
A few more figures from the pilot, because they tell you who actually uses this visa:
- 743 visas issued across the whole pilot, January 2024 to May 2026
- 398 holders resident as of May 2026
- 278 (70%) hold OECD-country passports
- 206 (52%) are in their thirties; another 74 (19%) in their forties
This is a small, high-earning, thirty-something, mostly-Western, mostly-Seoul population. The 2026 rules are an attempt to make the next cohort younger and more scattered.
Do you qualify?
Work through these in order.
1. Remote work for a foreign employer. You need an ongoing contract with a company based outside Korea, and you must show you have worked in the same field for at least one year. A brand-new gig does not establish the track record the manual asks for.
2. Income. Your salary evidence — payslips, bank statements — has to clear the GNI multiple that applies to you:
| Your situation | Multiple | Approx. annual (2025 GNI) |
|---|---|---|
| Default | 2× GNI | ~₩104.8 million |
| Younger / non-capital region | sliding, down to 1× | as low as ~₩52.4 million |
| Aged 18–34, in a non-capital or population-declining area | 1× GNI | ~₩52.4 million |
The exact multiple between the endpoints is set case by case within the one-to-two range; the two figures the Ministry has stated plainly are the 2× default and the 1× floor for young provincial applicants.
3. Insurance and record. Private medical insurance covering your stay, and a criminal-record certificate.
4. Family, if applicable. Spouses and children can accompany you; you supply the documents proving the relationship.
The catch in the regional discount
If you take the lower income threshold on the basis of living outside Seoul, the manual is clear that immigration will check whether you actually live there.
And there is a specific consequence if you move. If you qualified on the eased income standard and then relocate your residence to the capital region during your permitted stay, you are given six months — during which you must either meet the capital-region income standard (the full 2×) or move back out. The discount is tied to the behaviour, not granted once and forgotten.
So the regional route is not a loophole. It is a deal: the lower bar in exchange for genuinely living in the province you named. Documents that support it — a lease of at least one month, a booking at one of the 23 workation-designated facilities the Korea Tourism Organization has designated, or a usage record — are part of the application, not an afterthought.
Documents
The core set the manual lists:
- Application form, passport, standard photo, fee
- Certificate of employment showing at least one year in the same field
- Income evidence — payslips, bank balance certificates
- Criminal-record certificate and proof of medical insurance
- Family-relationship documents, if bringing family
- If claiming the regional discount: proof you will live outside the capital region — a lease of one month or more, or a workation-facility booking or usage record
Leaving and returning
Registered foreigners who leave and come back within one year do not need a separate re-entry permit. If less than a year remains on your stay, the exemption runs only to the end of that period. If you are under any entry restriction, it does not apply and you must arrange a permit in person.
For a visa built around people who travel, this matters: you can leave Korea and return without extra paperwork, as long as you are back inside a year and your status is otherwise clean.
Is this the right visa for you?
The F-1-D fits one situation precisely: you have stable remote income from outside Korea, you want to live here for one to three years, and you are not trying to work for a Korean company or build toward permanent residency through employment.
If your plan is to settle — to convert a few good years into a life here — the nomad visa is a starting room, not a destination. It does not itself lead to permanent residency. At some point you would look at whether your circumstances fit a residence track like the points-based F-2-7, which is a different test with a different logic.
But as a way to be legally, comfortably in Korea for a stretch of years while keeping the job you already have, on income earned somewhere else — this is the visa built for exactly that, and as of mid-2026 it is cheaper to get than it has ever been, if you are young and open about where you live.
Sources: Ministry of Justice / Korea Immigration Service, Residence Application Manual by Status (체류민원 자격별 안내 매뉴얼), July 2026 edition, digital nomad (F-1-D) section; Ministry of Justice press announcement, 7 July 2026; pilot statistics as reported 7–8 July 2026. Per-capita GNI: Bank of Korea provisional 2025 figure, ₩52,416,000, published 10 March 2026. Last reviewed: July 2026.
This is a guide, not legal advice. Income multiples and regional rules are new and may be refined; confirm your own case with the Immigration Contact Center (1345) or at HiKorea before relying on any figure here.