Durunuri: Korea Pays Up to 90% of Your Pension and Job Insurance at a Small Job

6 min read

If you work at a small place in Korea — a café, a hair salon, a hagwon with three teachers, a convenience store — there's a decent chance a boss has told you, at some point, some version of "we're too small for that" when 4대보험 (the four social insurances) came up. It's one of the most common ways foreign workers end up paid in cash with nothing deducted and nothing building toward anything. Most of the time, it isn't true, and Korea actually built a program specifically to make it not true: 두루누리, the Social Insurance Support Program, where the government pays most of the premium itself.

  • Under 10Employees at the business — the size cutoff to qualify
  • ₩2.1 millionMonthly wage ceiling per worker, checked against average pay
  • 36 monthsMaximum time the subsidy runs per worker

What Durunuri actually is

두루누리 사회보험료 지원사업 is a joint program run by 근로복지공단 (the Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Service) and 국민연금공단 (the National Pension Service). It exists because Korea's smallest workplaces have the lowest rate of properly enrolling staff in social insurance — not always out of malice, sometimes because a business genuinely runs on thin margins — so instead of just mandating it and hoping, the government pays most of the bill itself.

Durunuri eligibility: a business with fewer than 10 workers, paying a worker under 2.1 million won a month who is newly enrolling in pension and employment insurance, gets 90 or 80 percent of both premiums covered by the government Fewer than 10 workers there Counted monthly, by law Earning under ₩2.1M a month And newly enrolling 90% or 80% of pension and job insurance covered
All three conditions have to line up — size, wage, and being a new enrollee.

"Newly enrolling" matters as much as the other two. If you've already been paying into pension or employment insurance for a while, the subsidy doesn't disappear — it drops to a flat 40%, still real money, just a smaller share than someone just starting out gets.

Under 5 employees, new subscriber

Government covers 90% of both your and your employer's share.

5–9 employees, new subscriber

Government covers 80% — still most of the bill.

Whichever tier applies, it runs for a maximum of 36 months from when the support starts, not from when you started the job — so someone who worked two years unregistered before an employer finally files, then gets three more years of the subsidy from that point.

What it does and doesn't cover

The one that catches people Durunuri only touches two of Korea's four insurances: 국민연금 (national pension) and 고용보험 (employment insurance). Health insurance and industrial accident insurance are separate, always mandatory regardless of company size, and never discounted by this program — see our guides to national health insurance and industrial accident insurance for those.

It also doesn't create eligibility that wasn't there — it just makes the eligibility you already have cheaper. Whether employment insurance applies to you at all depends heavily on your visa: our guide to unemployment benefits breaks down the three coverage tiers by visa type, from automatic full coverage down to voluntary-only. National pension has its own separate carve-out — a reciprocity exception if your home country doesn't cover Korean nationals working there, plus D-2 students, trainees and diplomats — covered in our pension refund guide. Durunuri sits on top of whichever of those already applies to you; it doesn't override them.

Checking whether you're actually getting it

Checking Durunuri support: look at your payslip for the pension and employment insurance deduction lines, then check your enrollment and support history through the National Pension Service or 4대사회보험 정보연계센터, then report a missing subsidy to the National Pension Service or Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Service if your employer never applied Check your payslip Pension + job insurance deduction lines Look up your record Via NPS or the 4대보험 information portal Report if it's missing To NPS or 근로복지공단
The subsidy is usually filed by your employer — but you can check it and flag it yourself.

Your employer normally applies for Durunuri at the same time they register you for 4대보험, so there's nothing extra for you to sign. But it's worth checking yourself, especially at a small business where paperwork gets handled loosely: your pension and employment insurance deduction lines should be there on your payslip from month one, and the National Pension Service (nps.or.kr) lets any insured worker look up their own contribution and support history directly. If your employer already claimed the subsidy but the discount never actually reduced what came out of your pay, or if you believe you qualify and were never enrolled at all, both NPS and 근로복지공단 take reports from workers directly — you don't need your employer to file it for you.

Quick Hop Higher earners and business owners past a certain income or asset level are excluded even if the headcount and wage numbers fit — the exact thresholds are set by the agencies and worth confirming for your specific case through the 두루누리 site or the NPS/근로복지공단 call centers, rather than assuming from a number you read somewhere.

What Soo House sees

Soo House is the community platform we run for expats and foreign residents in Korea — event listings, paid creator and brand campaigns, and the kind of everyday questions members bring to our community conversations. One pattern comes up over and over there: it's almost always the smallest workplaces — a three-person café, a one-owner beauty studio — where a worker gets told insurance "doesn't apply" to a place that size. It's a believable line, because small businesses genuinely do face real cost pressure, and most workers have no way to check whether it's true. Durunuri is the part of this system that flips that math: for a business under 10 people paying someone under ₩2.1 million a month, the government is often covering most of the premium either way, which makes "too small to afford it" a much harder sentence to say honestly. If you're a foreign resident working a small job in Korea and nobody has ever mentioned this program to you, that's worth a conversation with your employer — or a direct check with NPS yourself.

Your Next Hop

If you work at a small business in Korea, check your payslip tonight for the 국민연금 and 고용보험 lines. If they're missing and you think you qualify, contacting NPS or 근로복지공단 directly costs you nothing and takes the guesswork out of whether your employer's "too small" explanation actually holds up.

Checked in September 2026 against the official Durunuri program site run jointly by the Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Service and the National Pension Service, the Ministry of Employment and Labor's Durunuri overview via Korea.kr, and the National Pension Service's Durunuri support inquiry service for how workers report missing or incorrect support. Business-size and wage thresholds, subsidy percentages, and exclusion criteria are reviewed periodically — confirm the current figures for your situation through the official site or by calling NPS or 근로복지공단 before relying on any number here.

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