Korean Property Registration Cost Calculator

Buying a home in Korea costs more than the purchase price on completion day. Transferring title into your name brings a string of taxes and charges. Acquisition tax with its attached local education tax and rural special tax is the largest, followed by stamp duty on the contract, a compulsory purchase of national housing bonds, the registry filing fee and the judicial scrivener's fee. This calculator works each item out and shows the total you need ready on completion day and what share of the price it represents.

It covers residential purchases only. Commercial property and land follow a different acquisition tax schedule and different bond brackets, so the figures would be wrong. Surcharged acquisition tax for multiple-home owners and corporations is also outside its scope; it uses the standard rates.

Anyone planning finances before signing a contract. Matching the price to the loan and forgetting the registration costs is how buyers end up several million won short on completion day. The costs scale with the price, so a budget needs a line for them right next to the purchase price.

It is also useful once you have a quote from a judicial scrivener. Quotes mix taxes, bonds, fees and the scrivener's own charge into one figure, which makes it hard to tell which parts are fixed by law and which are negotiable. Recomputing item by item shows at once how much the fee is and whether the bond discount matches the market.

Acquisition tax comes from 지방세법 제11조. For a purchased home the rate is 1% up to ₩600 million, rises with the price between ₩600 million and ₩900 million, and reaches 3% above ₩900 million. Local education tax under 제151조 is one tenth of the acquisition tax rate for residential purchases, so 0.1% up to ₩600 million. Rural special tax under 농어촌특별세법 제4조 is exempt for homes of 85㎡ or less and 0.2% above that.

Stamp duty under 인지세법 제3조 is a fixed amount per band of the stated contract price. Homes at or below ₩100 million are exempt; above that and up to ₩1 billion the duty is ₩150,000, and above ₩1 billion ₩350,000. National housing bonds are set by the schedule to 주택도시기금법 시행령 as a rate per thousand of the standard (official) value, varying by band and region. Below a standard value of ₩20,000,000 no bonds are required; between ₩260 million and ₩600 million the rate is 26 per thousand in the capital region and 21 elsewhere, and above ₩600 million 31 and 26 respectively. Most buyers sell the bonds back immediately, so the real cost is the purchase amount times that day's discount rate.

The registry filing fee is fixed by the fee rules for certified copies and registration: ₩18,000 in person, ₩15,000 on the electronic standard form and ₩10,000 fully online. The scrivener's fee is negotiated rather than fixed, so it is an input. The calculation multiplies the price by the three tax rates, then adds stamp duty, the bond cost, the filing fee and the scrivener's fee.

Say you buy a flat of 85㎡ or less in the capital region for ₩600 million, the standard value is ₩420 million, the bond discount rate is 8, the scrivener charges ₩400,000 and you file on the electronic standard form. Acquisition tax is 1% of ₩600 million, or ₩6,000,000; local education tax at 0.1% is ₩600,000; there is no rural special tax, so taxes come to ₩6,600,000.

Stamp duty falls in the band above ₩100 million and up to ₩1 billion, so ₩150,000. Bonds are 26 per thousand of ₩420 million, or ₩10,920,000 worth, and selling them straight back at a discount of 8 leaves a real cost of ₩873,600. Add the ₩15,000 filing fee and the ₩400,000 scrivener's fee and the non-tax costs are ₩1,438,600. The full registration bill is ₩8,038,600, about 1.3% of the price.

The most common is counting the full bond purchase as a cost. In the example you do not lose ₩10,920,000; the real cost is the ₩870,000 or so you give up when selling the bonds back. The opposite mistake, forgetting the bonds altogether, is also common. The discount rate moves daily, so use a figure close to your completion date.

The second is basing the bonds on the purchase price rather than the standard value; that overstates them. The third is the ₩600 million and ₩900 million thresholds. Even slightly above ₩600 million the acquisition tax rate starts climbing from 1%, so a price near a threshold deserves a separate check during negotiation. Finally, these are standard rates. If you already own a home and are buying in a designated area, check the surcharged rate separately.