Korean Land & Building Property Tax Calculator

This calculator works out the annual property tax on real estate that is not housing: land, and buildings such as shops and factories. Enter the officially assessed value in units of ₩100 million, set the fair market value ratio, choose the tax category, and you get the property tax, the local education tax charged on top of it, and the annual total. It also shows the effective rate against the assessed value, so you can see at a glance roughly what percentage your land carries.

Only the property tax itself and the local education tax are included. The urban-area property tax and the regional resource facility tax that often appear on the same bill are left out, because how they attach varies by region and by property. Housing is deliberately excluded: it has a completely different rate structure and a special rate for single-home households, so it has its own calculator.

Anyone about to buy land or a commercial building, before signing. To judge a rental yield properly you need the fixed costs that will go out every year after purchase, and property tax is the first line of those. Vacant land in particular climbs into higher rate brackets than land under a shop, so if the plan is to demolish a building and hold the plot, it pays to see in advance how much the tax jumps.

It is also for people who have inherited or been given farmland or forest. Farmland is assessed individually at a very low rate, but if farming stops and the land is left idle it can move to the aggregate basis and the tax can multiply several times over. Switching the category shows the size of that difference. And it serves as a check when the bills arrive in July and September and you want to know whether the figure is right.

The rule is 지방세법 제111조제1항. 제1호 divides land into the aggregate, separate and individual bases and sets the rates; 제2호 sets the rates for buildings. Local education tax is 20% of the property tax under 제151조 of the same Act. The order is: multiply the assessed value by the fair market value ratio to get the tax base, apply the rate for the chosen category to get the property tax, then add 20% of that as local education tax.

The aggregate basis is progressive: 0.2% on a tax base up to ₩50 million, then ₩100,000 plus 0.3% of the excess up to ₩100 million, then ₩250,000 plus 0.5% of the excess above that. The separate basis is also progressive but with wider brackets and lower rates: 0.2% up to ₩200 million, then ₩400,000 plus 0.3% of the excess up to ₩1,000 million, then ₩2,800,000 plus 0.4% of the excess above that.

Individually assessed land and buildings use flat rates. Fields, paddies, orchards, pasture and forest are 0.07%; land for golf courses and luxury entertainment venues is 4%; factory sites and other individually assessed land are 0.2%. Ordinary buildings are 0.25%, factory buildings in residential zones 0.5%, and golf course or luxury venue buildings 4%. "Individually assessed" means the plot is taxed on its own rather than added to your other land; it does not mean the rate is low. Farmland is cheap, golf courses are very expensive.

Take land attached to a shop with an assessed value of ₩500 million and a fair market value ratio of 70%. The tax base is ₩350 million. On the separate basis that is above ₩200 million, so the tax is ₩400,000 plus 0.3% of the ₩150 million excess, which is ₩450,000, giving property tax of ₩850,000. Local education tax at 20% is ₩170,000, and the annual total is ₩1,020,000.

If the same ₩500 million were vacant land, the aggregate basis applies. A ₩350 million tax base is above ₩100 million, so the tax is ₩250,000 plus 0.5% of the ₩250 million excess, ₩1,250,000, for property tax of ₩1,500,000, local education tax of ₩300,000 and a total of ₩1,800,000. If it were farmland, the tax would be 0.07% of ₩350 million, ₩245,000, plus ₩49,000 local education tax, ₩294,000 in all. Same assessed value, more than a sixfold gap in the bill depending on the category.

The most common error is entering the purchase price or the asking price where the assessed value belongs. Property tax is charged on the published land price and the building's official assessed value, which are usually well below market. For land it is the individual published land price multiplied by the area; for buildings it is the value the local government publishes. Both can be checked on Government24 or WeTax.

Choosing the wrong category is next. Even land under a shop is moved from the separate to the aggregate basis for any part that is excessively large relative to the building's footprint. Also, whoever owns the property on 1 June pays the whole year's tax, so closing a purchase at the end of May lands a full year's bill on the buyer. That is why sale dates get shifted around 1 June and why contracts sometimes split the burden. Finally, the total here is property tax plus local education tax only; the actual bill may be larger once the urban-area portion and the regional resource facility tax are added.