Why so many young Koreans have never moved out
Most unmarried Koreans in their twenties and thirties still live with their parents, and the arithmetic of a deposit-based rental market explains more of it than any account of comfort or culture.
The Korean term is kangaroo tribe, kaenggeoru jok, and it carries a light sting: the adult child who stays in the pouch. The phenomenon it names is not marginal. Statistics Korea’s population and household surveys have consistently found that a clear majority of unmarried Koreans in their twenties and thirties live in the parental home, with the share in the late twenties running well above half and remaining substantial into the thirties. Analyses by state research institutes through 2023 and 2024 put the number of adults in this position in the millions.
The instinct abroad is to read this as a cultural fact about family closeness, and there is something to that. Korean households have not historically treated a child’s departure at eighteen as a rite of passage; university students commonly commute from home, and the American model in which leaving is itself the achievement has no local equivalent. But culture is a poor explanation for a trend that moves, and this one has moved: the share of young adults living with parents has risen over the past two decades rather than held steady, which points at prices rather than at values.
The arithmetic is unusual and worth stating plainly, because it is where the explanation lives. The dominant Korean rental contract is not a monthly rent but jeonse, in which the tenant hands the landlord a lump-sum deposit — historically half or more of the property’s value — and pays nothing monthly, recovering the deposit at the end of the lease. For a young worker this is a wall. Assembling a deposit that in Seoul routinely runs to hundreds of millions of won requires either accumulated savings that a first job does not generate, a parental transfer, or a leveraged deposit loan whose interest is the real monthly cost. The alternative, wolse, converts the deposit into monthly rent at an implied rate that is deliberately unattractive, and the affordable end of that market is largely the small, semi-basement or rooftop stock whose quality has been a recurring public issue.
Set that against wages. Median pay for workers in their twenties supports a monthly rent and utilities in the metropolitan area only by absorbing a large share of income, and the saving rate left over is not sufficient to accumulate a deposit at the pace deposits themselves have grown. Moving out is therefore not a step toward the housing ladder but a step away from it: the young person who rents alone spends the money that the young person who stays at home banks. Rational behaviour under those conditions looks exactly like the behaviour being criticised.
Comparison helps calibrate. Eurostat’s estimated average age of leaving the parental home varies enormously within Europe — under twenty-two in the Nordic countries, above thirty in parts of southern Europe — and the variation tracks housing costs and youth employment far more closely than it tracks any measure of family sentiment. The Korean case is not exotic; it is the southern European pattern arriving in a country whose capital region concentrates jobs to an unusual degree.
The costs are nonetheless real and fall on both sides. Parents nearing or past retirement absorb the living expenses of adult children at precisely the point when Korea’s thin pension provision leaves them least able to, which is one channel through which old-age poverty and youth housing costs are connected. Young adults defer the household formation that precedes marriage and children, and the demographic statistics record the result. And the arrangement is stigmatised in the way that arrangements driven by prices tend to be, with commentary that treats a budget constraint as a character flaw.
What would change it is not exhortation. It is cheaper small-unit housing where the jobs are, a rental market that does not demand a capital sum up front, or wages that grow as fast as deposits. None is a quick instrument, which is why the kangaroo tribe has outlasted every campaign against it.