5% of Koreans Earn over W100 Million a Year

Some 1.2 million Koreans or five percent of the population earned more than W100 million a year in 2020 (US$1=W1,423).

According to National Tax Service data, 1.19 million people reported incomes of more than W100 million two years ago.

A total of 24.58 million people reported their income to the NTS in 2020, and 4.9 percent of them earned more than W100 million, up from just 3.8 percent five years earlier.

The top bracket accounted for a whopping 24.9 percent or nearly a quarter of the W226.7 trillion in earnings reported to the NTS by all of the wage earners, up from 21.6 percent in 2015.

In other words, the rich are getting richer, but there are also more of them.

Meanwhile, Sejong administrative city saw the biggest increase in people whose real estate inflated so much in value that they had to pay the punitive comprehensive real estate taxes for it.

According NTS data, 10,453 individuals paid comprehensive real estate taxes in Sejong last year, up a staggering 661.3 percent compared to 2017.

Next was Songpa District in Seoul, which is part of greater Gangnam (up 307.7 percent), the Seo District of Dajeon (289.4 percent), Gwangmyeong city in Gyeonggi Province (240.7 percent) and Gangdong in Seoul (240.5 percent).