Where Korea’s English-teaching jobs are
Every guide to teaching in Korea tells you the work is concentrated around Seoul. This page tells you by how much, from a count of the adverts that are live right now, with the denominator under every figure.
DATA UPDATED · COMPUTED LIVE FROM 447 ADVERTS · COUNTS OF ADVERTS, NOT OF EMPLOYERS
The board right now
LucyESL holds 447 live English-teaching adverts in South Korea. 88.2% of them are in Seoul, Gyeonggi / Incheon and Busan — 395 adverts between three of the thirteen regions. 316 are posted by the employing school, university or public programme; 131 come through a recruiter.
Of the 440 adverts offering a monthly salary, 41 state the total hours you would be at the school (9.3%). What the rest of the advert says, and does not, is counted on the disclosure page.
Every region, counted
An advert that names two regions is a row in each of them and one advert on the board, so these rows add up to more than 447. That is the honest reading of “jobs in Busan”, and it is exactly what the Busan page returns.
| Region | Live adverts | Direct hire | Recruiter | State on-site hours | Stating pay | Median pay |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seoul | 220 | 147 | 73 | 22 of 216 (10.2%) | 156 | ₩2,500,000 |
| Gyeonggi / Incheon | 139 | 109 | 30 | 12 of 136 (8.8%) | 104 | ₩2,500,000 |
| Busan | 36 | 23 | 13 | 2 of 36 (5.6%) | 22 | ₩2,500,000 |
| Gyeongsang | 12 | 8 | 4 | 0 of 12 (0%) | 9 | ₩2,500,000 |
| Gwangju | 8 | 8 | 0 | 0 of 8 (0%) | 6 | withheld |
| Chungcheong | 7 | 5 | 2 | 1 of 7 (14.3%) | 7 | withheld |
| Jeju | 7 | 4 | 3 | 2 of 7 (28.6%) | 7 | withheld |
| Sejong | 5 | 4 | 1 | 1 of 5 (20%) | 3 | withheld |
| Daegu | 3 | 1 | 2 | 1 of 3 (33.3%) | 1 | withheld |
| Daejeon | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 of 3 (0%) | 2 | withheld |
| Gangwon | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 of 3 (0%) | 3 | withheld |
| Jeolla | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 of 3 (0%) | 1 | withheld |
| Ulsan | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 of 2 (0%) | 2 | withheld |
The same counts as a map What the adverts pay What the adverts state
How this is counted
- What is in it. Every advert live on LucyESL at the moment you load the page, with sample rows excluded. Most are copied from public Korean-market job boards and are labelled as copied on the listing itself; they are counted like any other advert and are not verified by LucyESL.
- Direct hire against recruiter is the type of the account the advert sits under: a school, a university, an international school or a public programme against an agency placing teachers for them.
- On-site hours counts adverts offering a monthly salary under an employment contract — the same denominator /disclosure uses. Silence is not a “no”: an advert that does not state its hours is one you would have to ask.
- Median pay follows /salaries to the letter: full-time, salaried, pay stated, and only adverts naming a single region — one salary cannot belong to two cities. Below 8 adverts a region’s median is withheld and its count still printed.
- What it is not. Not a count of every English-teaching vacancy in Korea, not a statement about any school, and not a benchmark for what a job should pay.
The record
The LucyESL Advert Record — recorded every month since September 2026, by region, with the denominator. A month that was not counted while it happened cannot be counted later.
The figures above recompute every time this page is read, so quote them with the date they carry. The monthly record is where a month stands still: on the first of each month the board writes down what it held, by field and by region, and that page never changes again. One month recorded so far, beginning with September 2026.
We looked for a published regional breakdown of Korean English-teaching vacancies on 2026-09-18 and again on 2026-09-20 and could not find one, in English or Korean, with a method, a sample size or a date. If one exists, tell us and this page will link it.
Quoting this
Suggested citation: LucyESL, “Where Korea’s English-teaching jobs are, by region”, 2026-09-20, from 447 live adverts. https://lucyesl.com/market (CC BY 4.0)
The figures are open data under CC BY 4.0: quote them, chart them, put them in a report — name LucyESL and link the page. The same numbers as data: JSON, and the other ways a program can read this board.