If you are American or British and you have been told you need a K-ETA to visit South Korea, that is currently wrong. It will be right again on 1 January 2027 unless the Korean government does what it has done at the end of every December since 2023.
And there is a catch in the exemption that almost nothing written in English mentions: because you are not carrying a K-ETA, you have to fill in an arrival card. The people who pay for a K-ETA they do not legally need are buying exactly one thing — the right to skip that form.
What is in this guide
- The short version
- The K-ETA exemption, and the date that matters
- The arrival card trap
- What K-ETA is not
- How long you can stay
- Passport validity, and the six-month myth
- Q-CODE, and why the answer is probably not
- Customs, and a rule that changed while nobody updated the websites
- There is no departure tax to pay at the airport
- Medication: the rule that can genuinely go wrong
- The money you can get back
- What we could not verify
This page sets out what the rules actually say, with the Korean government source for each. It carries no affiliate links. Everything below was read on 20 August 2026, and the one date you must re-check before you fly is flagged in bold.
The short version
| US citizen | UK citizen | |
|---|---|---|
| Visa needed for tourism | No | No |
| Length of visa-free stay | 90 days | 90 days |
| K-ETA needed right now | No, exempt to 31 Dec 2026 | No, exempt to 31 Dec 2026 |
| Arrival card needed | Yes, because you hold no K-ETA | Yes, because you hold no K-ETA |
| Passport validity | Valid for your stay. No six-month rule | Valid past your departure date |
| Onward ticket | Not stated by the US government | Required, per the FCDO |
| Q-CODE health form | Only if you have symptoms | Only if you have symptoms |
The K-ETA exemption, and the date that matters
K-ETA is Korea’s electronic travel authorisation. Normally, if you come from a visa-waiver country you must hold one before you board.
Since 2023 Korea has suspended that requirement for a list of countries, and it has renewed the suspension every year. The current period runs from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2026, announced by the Ministry of Justice in late December 2025 and published by Korean embassies and consulates worldwide.
There is no announcement yet for 2027. The pattern is that Korea decides in the last week of December for the year that follows — the 2025 extension was announced on 4 January 2025, the 2026 extension on 23 December 2025. The US State Department currently tells Americans that from 1 January 2027 a K-ETA will be required again.
So the honest advice is: if you are travelling in 2026, you do not need one. If you are travelling in 2027, check in the first week of January, because that is when the answer will exist.
Who is exempt
Twenty-three countries and territories, by region as Korea lists them:
- Asia: Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Macao
- Americas: Canada, United States, Guam
- Europe: United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Poland, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Belgium, Denmark, Austria
- Oceania: Australia, New Zealand
Switzerland and Liechtenstein are also listed by the Korean Embassy in Bern but do not appear on the Korea Tourism Organization’s list. That discrepancy does not affect American or British readers, who appear on every version.
The arrival card trap
This is the part worth reading twice.
The exemption removes the K-ETA. It does not remove the arrival card. In fact the Korean government’s own notices state the relationship the other way round. Verbatim, from the notice published by Korean missions:
> if a traveler who is eligible for K-ETA temporary exemption wants to apply for K-ETA to receive benefits such as not having to submit an arrival card upon entry, he/she may apply for K-ETA and pay the fee
And the Korea Tourism Organization confirms who is exempt from the arrival card: holders of a valid residence card, a K-ETA, or an e-Group visa.
Put those together and the logic is inescapable. You are exempt from the K-ETA. You therefore do not hold one. You therefore must submit an arrival card.
You can do it two ways: on paper at the immigration desk, or online in advance as a free e-Arrival Card, which can be submitted within 72 hours of arrival.
There is one live uncertainty here worth flagging. Several professional immigration advisories reported that the e-Arrival Card became mandatory for all travellers from 1 January 2026, which would remove the paper option. But the UK Foreign Office, updating its page on 14 May 2026 — well after that date — still describes the paper form as an alternative. We could not reach Korea’s own e-Arrival Card portal to settle it. Fill in the online card in advance and the question does not arise.
What K-ETA is not
Four things get conflated constantly.
K-ETA is not a visa. It is permission to board and be presented for inspection. Entry is granted by the immigration officer at the port, and holding a K-ETA guarantees you nothing.
K-ETA does not set how long you can stay. The authorisation is valid for up to three years, or until your passport expires. Your stay is 90 days, and that comes from the separate visa-waiver arrangement between Korea and your country. People read valid for three years and think they have a three-year permission. They do not.
K-ETA is not the same as the arrival card, as above.
K-ETA is not the same as Q-CODE, which is a health declaration and a completely separate system.
How long you can stay
Ninety days, for both American and British citizens, for tourism, business meetings, conferences or visiting family.
You will see it claimed that different English-speaking nationalities get different allowances in Korea. For the US and UK that is not true — both are 90 days, confirmed by the Korean Consulate General in New York and the Korean Embassy in London respectively.
We could not verify whether or how a visa-free 90-day stay can be extended from inside Korea. Korea’s immigration portals were unreachable to us, and we are not going to describe an extension procedure we have not read. If you need longer than 90 days, that is a question for a Korean consulate before you travel.
Passport validity, and the six-month myth
You do not need six months’ validity to visit Korea as a tourist.
The UK Foreign Office states that for a stay of up to 90 days your passport needs an expiry date after the date you leave Korea. The US State Department is blunter: must be valid at the time of entry, there is no minimum expiration validity requirement.
The six-month rule applies to long-term Korean visas, and it has been generalised into travel writing as though it covers everybody. It does not.
Q-CODE, and why the answer is probably not
The blanket Q-CODE requirement ended on 15 July 2023. Arrivals now get a temperature check.
Korea maintains two different designations, and conflating them is the usual error:
- Strict quarantine management areas — 25 countries as of 1 July 2026. Anyone who has visited or transited one must submit Q-CODE or a paper health questionnaire.
- General quarantine management areas — 173 countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States. Only required if you have symptoms.
So for a normal traveller flying from London or Chicago, no. If you arrive unwell, or you have transited through a country on the strict list, yes. Non-compliance carries a fine of up to 10 million won.
We have deliberately not reproduced the 25-country strict list. We could not reach Korea’s disease control agency directly and only obtained the list through a news report of its release. Check it at source if you are routing through Africa or the Middle East.
Customs, and a rule that changed while nobody updated the websites
| Allowance | |
|---|---|
| Total value of goods | USD 800 |
| Alcohol | 2 litres, under USD 400 |
| Tobacco | 200 cigarettes |
| Perfume | 100 ml |
| Currency declaration threshold | USD 10,000 |
Under-19s get no alcohol or tobacco allowance at all.
The alcohol rule changed on 21 March 2025. The old limit was two bottles, and the bottle count was removed from the Customs Act Enforcement Rule on that date. Only the two-litre and USD 400 caps survive, which means three smaller bottles are now fine where they were not before.
What makes this a good example rather than a trivia item: the Korea Tourism Organization’s own page and Incheon Airport’s own page both still say two bottles. Official pages go stale too, which is why we date everything.
Since 1 May 2023, if you have nothing to declare you do not fill in a customs form at all.
There is no departure tax to pay at the airport
Korea levies passenger service charges — 17,000 won at Incheon and Gimpo, 12,000 won at other airports — plus a departure levy for the Tourism Promotion Fund. All of it is included in your ticket and remitted by the airline. You will not be asked for anything at the gate.
We could not confirm the current amount of the departure levy itself, and the airport charge figures come from Korea’s aeronautical publication in a package dated 2020. The important part — that you pay nothing separately — is solid.
Medication: the rule that can genuinely go wrong
This is the one item on this page that has stopped people at the border, and the rule splits cleanly in two.
Ordinary, non-narcotic medicines. No approval needed. Bring proof it is for personal use — a prescription, a doctor’s letter, or the pharmacy label. The limit is six bottles or three months’ supply, and you should keep everything in its original packaging.
Anything containing a narcotic or psychotropic substance. You need prior approval from Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, before you travel, regardless of your nationality. There is no personal-use exemption. Applications can be made online through the MFDS drug portal, which has accepted them since 27 December 2024, or by email. The stated turnaround is ten business days, so allow two to three weeks.
We are not publishing a list of named drugs. The authoritative list sits in the schedules to Korea’s Narcotics Control Act, which we could not reach, and a half-remembered list is worse than no list. The categorical rule is the one to act on: if what you take is controlled where you live, assume it is controlled in Korea and apply. Note also that an MFDS permit is necessary but not sufficient — Korean customs makes the final call at the border.
The money you can get back
Korea has no tourist tax and no lodging tax. It has the opposite: two refund schemes aimed squarely at foreign visitors.
On shopping
VAT is 10 per cent, and there are two mechanisms.
Immediate refund at the till. Minimum purchase 15,000 won, maximum 1,000,000 won per transaction and 5,000,000 won for the whole trip. The retailer deducts the tax before you pay and you simply leave.
General refund. Same 15,000 won minimum, claimed later at a refund counter or one of the 24-hour kiosks at Incheon, Gimpo, Gimhae and Jeju.
You qualify if you are a foreigner staying under six months. You do not if you live or work in Korea. And the refund covers goods only — restaurant meals, massages and other services are excluded, which is where most confusion comes from.
The commonly quoted 30,000 won minimum is wrong. It is 15,000.
On hotels
This one is real, generous, and almost never explained properly in English.
Korea refunds VAT on accommodation at certified hotels for foreign visitors. To qualify you must be a non-Korean without a residence or work visa, in Korea for under six months, staying under 30 days at the hotel, paying the hotel directly, and departing Korea within three months of checking out. Breakfast counts if it is included in the room rate; anything else billed to the room does not.
The condition nobody writes about is on the hotel’s side: to be certified, a property must not have raised its average daily rate by more than 10 per cent against the same period in the previous year. That is what keeps hotels from simply pocketing the difference.
Two warnings. First, the certified-hotel list published by the Korea Tourism Organization is stamped as last updated in July 2020, so confirm your specific hotel participates rather than assuming. Second, on 7 August 2026 Korea’s Ministry of Economy and Finance proposed ending the scheme early, on 30 June 2027, on the grounds that it barely influenced where foreigners chose to travel and that the benefit concentrated in luxury hotels in Seoul, Busan and Jeju. That is a government bill, not law, and it had not passed as of 20 August 2026.
We could not verify the refund rate from a primary source, and sources disagree on the scheme’s statutory end date. So we are not printing either.
What we could not verify
We would rather show you the holes than fill them.
The K-ETA fee and processing time. Korea’s K-ETA portal was unreachable to us across dozens of attempts over several hours, and every other source offering a fee was a commercial visa agency. We are not passing those on. If you choose to apply voluntarily to skip the arrival card, get the fee from the official portal itself and nowhere else — that space is full of lookalike sites charging a markup.
Whether the exemption continues into 2027. Not yet announced, as above.
In-country extension of a 90-day visa-free stay.
Whether foreign visitors can use automated gates on arrival. We confirmed they can on departure, aged 17 and over, with no registration. Arrival is a different question and we could not answer it.
Vape and e-cigarette import limits. Every source we found was a vape retailer.
The named list of controlled medicines, the current departure levy amount, and yellow fever certificate requirements for arrivals from endemic countries.
Editor’s note. Every rule on this page was read off a Korean government source — embassy and consulate notices, the Korea Tourism Organization, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, Incheon Airport, Korea’s aeronautical publication — on 20 August 2026, with the UK Foreign Office and US State Department used only as corroboration and never as the source of a Korean rule. We check on the day we write and print the date rather than editing quietly later. Two sentences on this page can get you denied boarding: the K-ETA date and the medication permit. Both are worth re-checking yourself before you fly, and the K-ETA one specifically in the first week of January 2027.