If you work in Korea, three of your four social insurances have a chapter about you. Health insurance has Article 109. The national pension has Article 126, with a reciprocity clause attached. Employment insurance has Article 10-2, and it treats you differently depending on your visa letter.
Industrial accident compensation insurance has nothing of the sort. Search the Act for a foreigner provision and you will not find one. That absence is not an oversight — it is the whole design, and it works in your favour.
The Act covers the workplace, not the worker
Article 6 of the Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance Act reads: "This Act shall apply to all businesses or workplaces which use workers." The exception clause that follows is about types of business, not types of person.
Read that again with the other three Acts in mind. Health insurance asks whether you are registered. The pension asks what your country does for Koreans. Employment insurance asks what your visa says. Industrial accident insurance asks about the business you work for.
So there is no application form for you to submit, no opt-in box, no reciprocity check. If the business you work for uses workers, it is covered, and you are working inside a covered business.
What I can and cannot tell you about visa status
I will be precise here rather than reassuring, because this is where bad advice circulates.
What the statute says: there is no nationality requirement and no residence-status requirement anywhere in the scope provision. What the statute does not say: it does not contain a sentence declaring that undocumented workers are covered. That question has been settled through court decisions and administrative practice rather than in the text of the Act itself, and I am not going to summarise case law I have not read in the original.
If your status is complicated, that combination — no statutory bar, plus a body of practice — is exactly the situation to take to a labour counsellor rather than to a forum thread.
Which businesses are excluded
Article 6 lets the Enforcement Decree carve out certain businesses. Decree Article 2 lists them, and the list is short:
- Businesses covered instead by the Public Officials' Accident Compensation Act or the Military Personnel Accident Compensation Act
- Businesses covered instead by the Seafarers Act, the Fishers and Fishing Vessels Accident Compensation Insurance Act, or the Pension for Private School Teachers and Staff Act
- Domestic work in a private household
- Agriculture, forestry (logging excluded), fishing and hunting, where the operator is not a corporation and there are fewer than five regular workers
Notice what the first two categories are: they are not gaps. Those workers are compensated under a different statute. The genuine gaps for a foreign worker are the last two — domestic work in a household, and very small non-corporate farms and fishing operations.
The five-worker count in the last category is not casual. Decree Article 2-2 defines it as the total headcount used over the first 14 operating days, divided by 14.
Part-time and student jobs count too
Article 6 says "all businesses or workplaces which use workers." It does not say full-time workers, or workers on a particular contract length. If you hold a student visa and work the hours your part-time work permission allows, you are working for a business that uses workers.
The definition in Article 5(2) points to the Labour Standards Act for what "worker" means, and that is a question about the substance of the working relationship rather than the label on it.
Your employer pays the whole premium
Look at your payslip. You will find deductions for health insurance, national pension and employment insurance. You will not find one for industrial accident insurance, and that is not a payroll error.
Article 13 of the Premium Collection Act sets out who pays what. Paragraph 2 makes the worker responsible for half the unemployment-benefit portion of the employment insurance premium. Paragraph 5 makes the employer responsible for the industrial accident premium. There is no paragraph anywhere assigning a worker share of the industrial accident premium.
This matters beyond the arithmetic. Because you contribute nothing, no one can argue that your unpaid contributions weaken your claim.
What counts as a work accident
Article 37 recognises three categories, all subject to one condition: there must be a proximate causal link between the work and the injury.
Category one — accidents at work
This covers injuries while doing your job or something incidental to it, injuries caused by defects or poor maintenance in facilities the employer provided, and accidents at company events or while preparing for them where the employer organised the event or told you to attend.
It also covers accidents during breaks, where what you were doing can be regarded as under the employer's control. People assume a break puts them outside coverage. The Act says otherwise.
Category two — occupational illness
Illness from exposure at work: physical agents, chemicals, dust, pathogens, physically demanding work. Illness arising from a work injury also belongs here.
And one more that surprises people: illness caused by work-related mental stress from workplace harassment under Labour Standards Act Article 76-2, or from abusive language by customers. This is written into the statute, not read into it.
Category three — commuting accidents
Two kinds. Accidents while commuting under the employer's control — company transport or its equivalent — and accidents "while commuting by an ordinary route and means."
The second kind is broad. Your own walk to the bus stop is a commute by an ordinary route and means. The Act does define what "commuting" is, in Article 5: movement between home and the place of work, or between one workplace and another.
One practical note on commuting: if you drive, the licence rules are their own subject, and driving in Korea on a foreign licence has a one-year limit that catches people out. Whether an accident is compensable and whether you were driving lawfully are separate questions, but you would rather not be answering both at once.
What is excluded
Article 37(2) removes injury, illness, disability or death caused by the worker's own intentional act, self-harm or criminal act. There is an exception where the act was done in a state of markedly diminished normal cognitive capacity, for reasons the Decree specifies.
The eight kinds of benefit
Article 36(1) lists them: medical care benefits, temporary layoff benefits, disability benefits, nursing benefits, survivors' benefits, sick leave compensation annuity, funeral expenses, and vocational rehabilitation benefits.
Then Article 36(2) adds the sentence that decides how this actually goes for you: benefits are paid "on the claim of the beneficiary." Nobody files on your behalf. Not the hospital, not your employer, not the Service. If no claim is made, nothing is paid.
Medical care benefits — and the three-day rule
Article 40 covers treatment at a designated industrial-accident medical institution; where that is not possible, the cost can be reimbursed instead. The scope is set out in the Act: consultation and examination, medicines and materials, prosthetic and other assistive devices, procedures and surgery, rehabilitation treatment, hospitalisation, nursing and care, and transport.
The limit: if the injury or illness can be cured with three days or less of treatment, medical care benefits are not paid.
Temporary layoff benefits — 70 per cent
Article 52 is short and worth knowing exactly. For the period you cannot work because you are receiving treatment, you get 70 per cent of your average wage per day. And again, if the period you cannot work is three days or less, nothing is paid.
Two different three-day rules, in two different articles, doing two different things. One is about how long treatment would take; the other is about how long you are off work. They are easy to confuse.
Leaving the job does not end your claim
This is the provision I would most want a foreign worker to know. Article 88(1): "A worker's right to receive insurance benefits shall not be extinguished by retirement."
Which means the pressure you might feel — that you must stay in the job to keep the claim alive, or that quitting forfeits it — has no basis in the Act. Paragraph 2 adds that the right cannot be transferred, seized or offered as security, so nobody can take it from you either.
How long you have
Article 112 sets the limitation period at three years for the right to receive benefits. The exception runs the other way for once: disability benefits, survivors' benefits, funeral expenses and the pneumoconiosis pensions get five years.
Article 113 adds that the limitation period is interrupted by making the claim under Article 36(2). So filing is not only how you get paid — it is also what stops the clock.
If your claim is refused
You have two stages, and both run on 90-day clocks.
First, a review request to the Service, under Article 103(3), within 90 days of the day you became aware of the decision. Note Article 103(5): you cannot bring an administrative appeal under the Administrative Appeals Act against these decisions. This channel is the channel.
Second, a re-examination request to the Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance Re-examination Committee at the Ministry of Employment and Labour, under Article 106(3), within 90 days of becoming aware of the review decision.
There is a shortcut in Article 106(1): if your case went through the Occupational Disease Judgment Committee, you may skip the review request and go straight to re-examination — within 90 days of becoming aware of the original decision.
What "average wage" means here
Since the money is calculated from your average wage, it is worth knowing where that term comes from. Article 5(2) says "worker", "wage", "average wage" and "ordinary wage" all carry the meaning given in the Labour Standards Act. Where an average wage cannot reasonably be determined under that Act, the Minister of Employment and Labour publishes an amount to be used instead.
So the figure is not something your employer decides for the purposes of your claim.
The comparison with the minimum wage rules is useful here, because both work the same way: the number comes from a statutory definition, and an agreement to accept less than the statute provides does not make that agreement effective.
Who runs it
The scheme is administered by the Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Service, established under Chapter 2 of the Act. Claims go there, review requests go there, and the second-stage re-examination goes to a committee at the Ministry of Employment and Labour instead.
One housekeeping point that matters more than it sounds: a claim can run for months, and decisions arrive by post. If you move, the 15-day address-change duty in the immigration rules is not the only reason to keep your details current — it is also how the decision letter, and the 90-day clock that starts when you become aware of it, reaches you. The reporting deadlines after moving house are worth a look while a claim is open.
The practical order of things
Get treated first. Tell the medical institution it was a work injury. Keep whatever shows what happened and when — photographs, messages, the names of people who saw it. Then file the claim yourself, because Article 36(2) means nothing moves until someone does.
If the answer is no, you have 90 days, and then another 90. Those are the two dates to write down.
How this fits with the other three
If you are working through the four insurances one at a time, the others are covered separately: employment insurance and unemployment benefits by visa type, the national pension and whether you get it back, and health insurance.
Put side by side, the pattern is clear. Three of them ask a question about you before they cover you. The fourth one asks about the business — and then covers you.
Sources
Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance Act (Act No. 21375, in force 1 July 2026), Articles 5, 6, 36, 37, 40, 52, 88, 103, 106, 112 and 113. Enforcement Decree of the same Act (Presidential Decree No. 36473, in force 1 July 2026), Articles 2 and 2-2. Act on the Collection of Insurance Premiums for Employment Insurance and Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance, Article 13. All consulted in the Korean original at the Korean Law Information Center.
This is general information about what the statutes say, not legal advice about your situation. For a specific claim, a labour counsellor or the Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Service is the right place to go.
