Korean National Pension Estimator

This calculator estimates, in today's money, the monthly old-age pension that someone currently paying national pension contributions will receive. Enter your birth year, monthly income, the year you joined and your total years of contributions, and it returns the age at which payments start and the expected monthly amount. If you have a spouse or dependants, the dependant supplement is added.

The national pension is not a savings account that returns what you paid. The benefit blends your own average income with the average income of all members in equal parts, so lower earners get back more than they paid in and higher earners relatively less. When you joined also matters: the same contributions buy different amounts because the income replacement rate has fallen year by year, and the calculator splits your membership by year to reflect that.

Employees and the self-employed planning for retirement who want a rough answer to "how much will the national pension alone give me". The pension service's website is exact because it uses your actual contribution record, but for trying different assumptions without logging in this is faster. You can see at once what a higher income or a few more years would change.

It matters most for people who may fall short of 10 years of contributions. Below 10 years there is no old-age pension at all, only a lump-sum refund of contributions. Anyone with a gap in their record can use it to decide whether voluntary continued membership or back payments are worth it.

Under 국민연금법 제51조제1항, the basic pension amount is the sum of the average income of all members (the A value) and your own average income (the B value), multiplied by a proportionality constant. The A value is published each year by the pension service; the figure applied for 2026 is ₩3,193,511. Your income is treated as the standard monthly income used for contributions and clamped between the floor of ₩410,000 and the ceiling of ₩6,590,000. The constant depends on when you were a member: 1.8 for membership from 1999 to 2007, falling a little each year from 1.5 in 2008 to 1.245 in 2025, and 1.29 from 2026 onwards. The calculator splits your membership into those periods and uses the weighted average.

The basic pension amount is then multiplied by a payment rate. Under 제63조제1항 and the proviso to 제51조제1항, 20 years of membership earns the full amount; from 10 to 20 years it starts at half and rises 5 percentage points a year; beyond 20 years it grows a further 5% a year. Dividing the annual figure by 12 gives the monthly pension. The starting age is fixed by birth year, and a spouse, children or parents add the dependant supplement under 제52조. Future wage growth and revaluation are not included, so this is a present-value figure; the nominal amount when you actually draw it will be larger.

Take the calculator's defaults: someone born in 1985 who joined in 2012 and contributes for 30 years on a monthly income of ₩3,000,000. The 2012 year carries a constant of 1.44, falling each year to 1.245 for 2025, and the 16 years from 2026 to 2041 carry 1.29, giving a weighted average of 1.3145. The A value of ₩3,193,511 plus the ₩3,000,000 income is ₩6,193,511, and multiplying by the constant gives a basic pension amount of ₩8,141,370 a year.

Thirty years is ten beyond the 20-year mark, so the payment rate is 150%. Applying that and dividing by 12 gives ₩1,017,671 a month, a little over a third of the ₩3,000,000 income. Payments begin at age 65, in 2050. With a spouse, the dependant supplement lifts the monthly figure to ₩1,043,224.

The first is reading the result as the number that will land in your account decades from now. It is in today's money; the actual pension is revalued with the A value and prices at the time, so the nominal figure will be higher. The second is entering take-home pay instead of gross income. The standard monthly income is pre-tax, and anything above the ceiling is cut off anyway, so high earners can simply enter the ceiling. The third is counting years in which no contributions were made. Exemption and arrears periods drop out, so count only the years actually paid.

The fourth is using this calculator when membership began before 1999. Earlier periods use a different old formula that the calculator does not cover, and the pension service's own lookup is the right tool. The fifth is assuming that military service and childbirth credits, back payments and divided pensions are included; they are not. Finally, many people forget that the national pension itself is pension income and is taxed together with their other income.