11JUL

South Korea makes nomad visa permanent

2 min read

10:19UTC

South Korea's justice minister Jung Sung-ho made the F-1-D 'workation' visa permanent on 30 June, cutting the income bar to roughly $36,963 for under-35s who settle outside the Seoul capital region.

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Key takeaway

South Korea makes its nomad visa permanent and cheaper for under-35s who settle outside Seoul, as depopulation policy.

South Korea's F-1-D "workation" visa became a permanent scheme on 30 June, closing a pilot that had run since January 2024 ¹. Maximum stay rises from two years to three. Applicants aged 18 to 34 who settle outside Seoul, Incheon and Gyeonggi Province now qualify at roughly $36,963, the country's per-capita gross national income (GNI), against the pilot's flat two-times-GNI rule.

Jung Sung-ho, the justice minister, framed the scheme around foreigners voluntarily putting down roots ². That purpose sets it apart from every other nomad visa this briefing tracks. Indonesia's E33G , Bulgaria's permit and Colombia's Type V all price access by income alone. Korea instead steers young arrivals into its depopulating provinces, using the visa as demographic policy rather than a revenue or talent play.

Korea has opened a third axis in the topic's politics. Pressure has run on two: left housing movements that read nomads as displacement, and right nativist blocs that read foreigners as threat. A state recruiting foreigners to refill emptying regions answers neither. It treats mobile workers as a fix for a domestic birth-rate problem, which is new ground for the category.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

South Korea has a 'workation' visa, called F-1-D, that lets foreign remote workers live and work there. It started as a two-year trial in January 2024 and has now become a permanent programme. The maximum stay rises from two years to three years. The bigger change is about money: to qualify, applicants used to need income worth twice the country's per-capita GNI (gross national income, a measure of average earnings per person). Now, if you are aged 18 to 34 and agree to live outside the crowded Seoul area, you only need income around the ordinary per-capita GNI, about $36,963 a year. The idea is to nudge younger foreign workers toward Korea's shrinking rural and regional towns rather than adding to Seoul's population.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

South Korea's per-capita GNI regional bar is demographic engineering aimed at its birth-rate collapse and regional depopulation, using immigration policy to route foreign workers toward the provinces the state most needs to repopulate.

The specific mechanism, a roughly halved income floor for the 18-34 cohort settling outside Seoul, Incheon and Gyeonggi, only works if enough applicants find the trade worth making, since Seoul itself keeps the old, higher two-times-GNI bar.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: Japan ran a comparable regional-revitalisation programme from 2014, offering relocation subsidies to residents willing to move out of Tokyo into depopulating prefectures. The subsidies ran for a decade without reversing Tokyo's net population gain, because the underlying pull, jobs, universities, wages, remained concentrated in the capital regardless of the cash incentive on offer.

Counter-parallel: No clean positive parallel exists among OECD states for an income-threshold visa mechanism succeeding at regional redistribution; Germany's regional settlement pilots for skilled migrants and the Baltic states' rural-resettlement grants have produced only localised, unpublished results rather than a demonstrated reversal of capital-region concentration.

Consensus view: The Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHASA) has tracked regional depopulation as a demographic emergency: much of the country outside Seoul, Incheon and Gyeonggi Province is losing working-age population faster than it can be replaced by births.

Justice Minister Jung Sung-ho's income-bar redesign, cutting the threshold for foreigners settling outside the capital region from twice per-capita GNI to roughly $36,963, follows KIHASA's logic that migration policy is a regional-survival lever alongside a labour tool.

Counter-view: The Bank of Korea and OECD migration reviews have both flagged that visa-volume interventions rarely move population geography at the scale needed. The F-1-D scheme ran as a pilot from January 2024 without published uptake figures large enough to register against regional decline, and a permanent scheme with a lower income bar still depends on foreign workers choosing to settle somewhere with fewer jobs and thinner services than Seoul offers.

Key tension: Whether lowering the income floor for regional settlement genuinely redirects population, or whether it mainly formalises a small existing flow of remote workers who would have chosen those regions anyway, leaving Seoul's concentration untouched.

Sources:The Korea Herald

Mentions:Jung Sung-ho →D8 visa →South Korea →Seoul →GNI →Tokyo →Germany →Baltic states →Type V →Japan →Bulgaria →OECD →Indonesia →Colombia →F-1-D →

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Update #10 · Spain's rent decree stalls on coalition rift

The Korea Herald· 11 Jul 2026

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