Your first 90 days in Korea, made easier.

Korea does not hand newcomers a manual

The rules exist — for visas, banking, health insurance, waste sorting, transit — but they sit scattered across government portals built for people who already read Korean and already know which office to call. Most foreigners find out what they were supposed to do only after a deadline has passed. Closing that gap is the whole reason this site exists.

90DaysKorea is written and edited by Kim Hyontae, who lives in Korea and publishes this site under his own name. We read the primary sources — immigration notices, ministry announcements, carrier terms, city ordinances — and we rewrite what they actually mean for someone standing at a counter with a passport and no Korean. Every figure we publish is traced to an official source and carries the date we checked it. When a rule changes, we change the page. We do not leave last year's fee sitting there because it still ranks.

Where the answer is genuinely unsettled, we say so plainly instead of guessing. A confident wrong number costs you a trip to an office and sometimes a fine, and we would rather tell you that a rule is in flux than watch you act on something we made up. That restraint is the point, not a limitation.

We write the way a Korean friend would explain it to you over coffee — the part the official page leaves out, the counter that is actually open on Saturday, the app screen that fails if your passport name has a hyphen in it. Nothing here is a translation of a press release.