Korea's E-9 visa quota for 2026: cut to 80,000, and what that does and doesn't change

Every December, a committee most foreign residents in Korea have never heard of decides how many new E-9 work visas the country will issue the following year. Most years that number barely makes the news. This year it dropped by more than a third, and if you're on an E-9 visa yourself, have a partner or roommate who is, or are just trying to understand how Korea's labor market treats foreign workers, the shape of that cut matters more than the headline figure.

• 80,000Korea's 2026 E-9 quota, set by the Foreign Workforce Policy Committee
• -38.5%Drop from 2025's 130,000 — the second straight year of cuts
• 50,000Of those slots reserved for manufacturing alone

A number that's been falling for two years straight

E-9, the Employment Permit System's main visa, is how Korea brings in non-professional labor for manufacturing, farming, fishing, construction and parts of the service sector — work that mostly isn't open to other visa categories. Every year, the 외국인력정책위원회 (Foreign Workforce Policy Committee), chaired out of the presidential policy coordination office, sets a national ceiling on how many new E-9 permits get issued. On December 22, 2025, it set 2026's at 80,000 — down from 130,000 in 2025 and 165,000 in 2024.

The government's stated reason is straightforward: the hiring surge that followed the pandemic has largely worked its way through the system, and job openings in manufacturing and construction — the two sectors that drive most E-9 demand — have been trending down. One formerly separate carve-out disappeared entirely in the process: shipbuilding had its own temporary E-9 quota from 2023 through the end of 2025, and as of 2026 that's folded back into the general manufacturing allocation rather than running as its own line item.

Where the 70,000 sector-specific slots go

Of the 80,000 total, 70,000 are assigned to specific sectors and 10,000 sit in a flexible reserve that isn't tied to any one industry — set aside to cover demand spikes nobody predicted in December. The sector split is heavily weighted toward manufacturing, which has taken the biggest share of E-9 labor for years and keeps that position even as the overall number shrinks.

Employers outside the Seoul capital region got one offsetting change: the cap on how many extra E-9 workers a non-metro manufacturer can hire above its base quota rose from 20% to 30%, and a company relocating its plant out of the capital region now faces no extra-hiring cap at all, where a 50-person ceiling applied before.

The number isn't released all at once

The 80,000 isn't handed out in a single batch in January. The Ministry of Employment and Labor runs several application rounds across the year, each covering a slice of the annual total, and each with its own short window for employers to apply through their local employment center or the work24.go.kr portal. The third round of 2026 opened applications from July 6 to 20, covering 12,630 of the year's permits — 9,020 of them in manufacturing alone — with results announced in early August.

What this actually changes if you're already here

For someone already on an E-9 visa, this decision doesn't rewrite your contract or shorten your stay. What it can affect is the market around you: fewer new permits means Korean employers have a smaller pool of newly arriving E-9 workers to choose from, which can make an employer more reluctant to let a current worker go, and can tighten the field if you're using one of your EPS workplace changes to look for a new employer this year. It's also worth knowing where E-9 leads if you stay the course: years of legal E-9 work experience are exactly what feeds Korea's E-7-4 points system, the path that converts E-9, E-10 and H-2 workers into a long-term visa with family rights E-9 never carried.

What Soo House sees

Soo House runs meetups, classes and campaigns for expats and foreign residents across Korea, and most of the members who show up to those are on E-7, F-series or student-track visas — visas where "how many work visas did the government issue this year" has never been a question anyone had to ask about their own status. But plenty of our members have a partner, a roommate, or a coworker on an E-9 or H-2 visa instead, and we hear the confusion every time a quota headline like this one lands: people assume it means something was taken away from someone already working here, when what actually shrank is the number of new arrivals next year. Getting that distinction right is the difference between reassuring a friend accurately and worrying them over nothing.

Your next hop: if you're on an E-9 visa and weighing whether to use one of your workplace changes this year, check which 2026 application round is currently open before you commit — a tighter annual quota means timing your move against the calendar matters more than it did last year.

Checked in October 2026 against the Ministry of Employment and Labor's December 22, 2025 press release confirming the 2026 E-9 quota, mirrored on the government's own Korea.kr policy briefing page, for the 80,000 total, the 2024–2025 comparison figures, the sector breakdown, and the end of the separate shipbuilding quota. The non-metro manufacturing hiring cap is confirmed in MOEL Notice No. 2026-69, issued under the same committee decision. The third-round application window (July 6–20, 2026) and its 12,630-permit size are confirmed via SBS Biz's report on the Ministry's announcement and a Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs notice on that same round's restaurant-sector allocation. Quotas and application windows are set annually and by round — confirm the current one with your local Employment Center, work24.go.kr, or the Ministry of Employment and Labor's 1350 hotline before acting on any figure here.