South Korean age system to be standardised from 2023

The South Korean parliament has passed a law to end Korea’s two traditional methods of counting age.

From June 2023, the traditional Korean age systems will no longer be used on official documents.

Only the internationally recognised, standard method will remain. The change is intended to reduce confusion by adopting the same system used in the rest of the world.

Currently, the most widely used age method in Korea is the so-called “Korean age” system. In this system, a person is one year old at birth and then gains one year on the first day of each new year.

There is also a second system in current usage, called the “counting age”. In this system, a person’s age is zero at birth and then gains one year on the first day of each new year. This method is used to calculate the legal age for alcohol consumption and smoking.

However, South Korea also uses the standard global system, in which age is determined by an individual’s birthday, with the first birthday occurring one year after birth.

This means that people in Korea can have three different ages. For example, as of 1 December 2022, a person born on December 31 2005 is 16 under the international system, 17 under the “counting” system and 18 under the “Korean age” system.

Yoo Sang-bum of the ruling People Power Party told said that “the revision is aimed at reducing unnecessary socio-economic costs, because legal and social disputes, as well as confusion, persist due to the different ways of calculating age”.