What Korean English-teaching job ads don’t tell you

DATA UPDATED 2026-09-11 · COMPUTED LIVE FROM 415 ADVERTS · COUNTS OF ADVERTS, NOT OF EMPLOYERS

Across the 415 live adverts on LucyESL, 76.7% state a monthly salary. Only 28% state the teaching hours, and 8.8% state the total hours you would be at the school.

Which means: for most of these jobs you cannot work out what the pay is worth per hour. Two adverts offering the same salary can be a long way apart in what they ask of you, and most of them do not give you what you would need to tell the difference.

Silence is not a “no”. An advert that does not mention pension is not an advert refusing pension — it is one you will have to ask. Everything on this page counts what adverts say. It says nothing about any school, and it is not a benchmark for what a job should pay.

How many adverts state each fact?

Severance, pension, health insurance, total on-site hours and paid vacation are counted against the 407 adverts offering an employment contract (근로계약) rather than all 415, because a contract engagement has no severance or pension to declare. Counting those the other way would score an honest advert as a silent one.

Why the hours line is the one to look for

Salary is the number every advert leads with, and it is the number that tells you least on its own. A post offering the same won can mean 22 teaching hours or 30, finishing at 6pm or at 10pm, with or without the desk time either side of class. The effective pay per teaching hour on the salary page can only be computed for the minority of adverts that state their hours — 28% of them. This page is about the rest.

What to ask before you sign

Every line below is silent on most adverts. None of these is an awkward question, and a school that will not answer them in writing has told you something.

• Teaching hours, and total hours on site. Ask for both. The gap between them is unpaid in practice on many contracts, and it is the difference between a good salary and an ordinary one.
• Split shift. Only 2.7% of adverts mention it either way. A morning block and an evening block with a gap in between is a long day that pays like a short one.
• Severance (퇴직금). Statutory after a year of service. Ask whether it is paid on top of the monthly figure or folded into it — folding it in is not lawful, and it is the most common way the advertised number is not the number.
• National pension and health insurance. Both are employer-shared. Ask what the deduction is, so the figure you compare is take-home, not headline.
• Housing. Provided, an allowance, or neither — and if an allowance, how much, since a studio in Seoul and the same allowance elsewhere are different jobs.
• Paid vacation, and when you may take it. Days alone do not settle it; hagwon calendars often fix them.

See the live listings Read the salary figures

Methodology & sources

• Population: every live advert on this board at the moment the page is served — published, moderation-approved, and not expired. Sample rows are excluded. 415 adverts today, covering listings posted between 2026-07-29 and 2026-09-11.
• Where the adverts come from: most are copied from public Korean-market job boards and are marked as copied wherever they appear on this site. The adverts are their authors’; these aggregate counts are computed here. No advert text, contact detail or personal information is republished on this page — only counts.
• “Stated” means the advert gives the fact at all, in either direction. An advert saying “no airfare” is counted as having stated it. Only an advert that is silent counts as silent.
• Two denominators. Teaching hours and split shift are counted against every live advert. Severance, pension, health insurance, total on-site hours and paid vacation are counted against the 407 adverts offering an employment contract, because the others have none to declare.
• Not benchmarks. These are counts of what adverts say. They are not claims about any employer, not a measure of how common a benefit is in Korean workplaces, and not advice about what a job should pay.
• Segments smaller than 8 are withheld rather than published thin.
• Recomputed on every request. The figures move as the board does; the date above is the most recent listing update.

Reuse these figures

Published under CC BY 4.0 — quote them anywhere, including commercially, with attribution. Machine-readable: /disclosure?format=json.

Suggested citation: LucyESL, “What Korean English-teaching job ads don’t tell you”, disclosure rates across 415 live adverts, 2026-09-11. https://lucyesl.com/disclosure