Seoul · stays of 30 days or longer

What a month in Seoul actually costs

Rent is not the number you budget with. This index adds maintenance, utilities, furniture, cleaning and the cash your deposit ties up, and reports one figure per district and property type — so you can put a defensible number in a budget document today.

Published by TAEGEUK CO., LTD. / kwarriors

Table 1 · All-in monthly cost

Median and 25–75th percentile, in KRW, for a stay of 30 days or longer. Cells with fewer than three samples are left empty on purpose — a number we cannot stand behind is worse than no number.

Table 2 · What changes when you stay longer

The honest finding for this segment: in deposit-free monthly housing, a longer stay spreads the one-time costs thinner — it does not move the rent. The steep duration discount lives in the deposit-based market, which we are measuring now.

What this number includes

✓ Included

  • Rent and maintenance fee
  • Utilities — electricity, gas, water
  • Internet and TV
  • Furniture and essentials, amortized
  • Cleaning, converted to a monthly figure
  • Deposit opportunity cost

✗ Not included

  • Food and groceries
  • Local transport
  • Personal mobile plan
  • Health insurance
  • Visa, ARC and administrative fees
  • International moving and shipping
  • The deposit itself — it is returned

Three things budgets always miss in Korea

  1. The deposit is not a fee, but it is still your money gone. Korean leases routinely ask for ₩5,000,000–20,000,000 held for the length of the stay. You get it back, so it never appears in a cost comparison — and then it lands on your cash flow anyway. This index prices that as an opportunity cost so it stops being invisible.
  2. No Alien Registration Card usually means no lease. Most landlords ask for an ARC, which a new arrival does not have for the first weeks — exactly when the home has to be signed. Which properties accept a passport alone is the question nobody has written down. We are counting it property by property; the number lands in v2 rather than as a guess here.
  3. “Maintenance fee” is not utilities. They are separate line items in Korea, and quotes frequently include one and not the other. When two quotes differ by 30%, this is usually why.

Method

Scope. Only homes bookable for 30 days or longer. Anything shorter is a different market and is excluded from the sample entirely, not averaged in.

Statistic. Median, never mean — one serviced residence would otherwise move a whole district. Samples outside 1.5×IQR are flagged and excluded from the aggregate, and kept in the dataset. Cells under three samples are published as no data.

Assumptions, stated so you can disagree with them. Deposit opportunity cost is calculated at 3.5% p.a. Where furniture is not supplied, a one-time setup of ₩1,200,000 is amortized over the stay. One-time costs are divided by the number of months.

Verification grades. A: signed contract or formal written quote. B: written answer from the operator. C: verbal. D: publicly listed price. Every row carries its grade, and the share of A and B is published at the top rather than buried.

Prices are market rates as listed. Booking through K-Warriors, our service fee is included in the price you see on each home.

Free to cite with a link. Seoul 30+ Day Housing Cost Index v1.0 (Q3 2026), TAEGEUK CO., LTD. https://kwarriors.com/cost-index

Need the number for your specific case?

Tell us the shape of the stay and we will send the one-page index as a PDF, plus what it means for your headcount and dates. A person replies within one business day.

We use this to send the index and to reply once. Nothing else, no list. A work email is required because the index is built for people budgeting on behalf of an organization.