Data guide › Companies

Companies

Korean corporate headquarters with government-recorded headcount and month-by-month employment. What is here, where it came from, and where it is thin.

What is here	Scope · Coverage by field · Sources · Industry codes
How to read it	Fields that mean less than they look like · Worksites are addresses · Two employee numbers
What it will not do	Out of scope · Known limits

Scope

Companies	152,367
Who is included	Korean for-profit corporate headquarters with 10 or more insured employees, identified from employment-insurance workplace records
Who is not	Sole proprietors, branches, non-profits, and companies under 10 insured employees. A registration number outside this set is not necessarily invalid
Employment history	36 months, monthly

Coverage by field

Measured across all 152,367 companies, not a sample.

Field	Present	Source
Employees (Employment Insurance)	100.0%	Workers' Compensation & Welfare Service
Address in English	100.0%	Rendered by rule
Established date	100.0%	FSC, else insurance inception
Worksite addresses	100.0%	Workers' Compensation & Welfare Service
Monthly employment series	91.9%	National Pension Service
Corporate registration number	70.5%	Financial Services Commission
Phone	69.3%	Financial Services Commission
Listing market · DART code	25.5%	Financial Services Commission
Homepage	18.3%	Financial Services Commission

10,284 companies (6.7%) have neither a Financial Services Commission match nor a pension link. For those, the record is employees, address, an insurance-inception date and a worksite count. It is thin, but no record is empty.

Sources and how often they change

Source	Gives	As of	Refresh
Korea Workers' Compensation & Welfare Service	Company and worksite master, worksite addresses, employment-insurance headcount, industry code	2025-12-31	Annual
National Pension Service	Monthly subscriber counts, hires, separations	2026-07	Monthly
National Tax Service	Registration status (active, suspended, closed)	Per record	Weekly
Financial Services Commission	Corporate registration number, incorporation date, contact, listing	Per record	Daily
Statistics Korea	KSIC 11th industry names in official English	—	Rare

Industry codes

industry in a search takes a KSIC code by prefix — Statistics Korea's industrial classification, 11th revision. 26 matches the whole division; 26299 matches one class. A section letter (C, G) is not accepted, and neither is an industry name.

.../search?industry=26&limit=5      # a division, 2 digits
.../search?industry=26299&limit=5   # one 5-digit class inside it

All 77 divisions in English, with how many companies fall under each.

Fields that mean less than they look like

Three fields carry a companion field saying what kind of value it is. Read them together.

name_en_class	official — the English name registered with the Financial Services Commission. generated — romanized from Korean by rule. It is a reading aid, not a registered name. Do not use it as a legal name.
established_date_source	fsc_estb — the incorporation date. insurance_inception — the date the company first enrolled in employment insurance. These are different facts and we do not blur them into one "founded" field.
nps_quality	A company can run several worksites, and pension records are per worksite. When we sum them we say how confident the sum is: clean, review, contaminated, unknown. clean means no sign of double counting — it is not a verification.

Worksites are addresses, not registrations

The source records employment-insurance registrations, and a company often holds more than one at the same address — a separate registration for a different class of worker, or one left at zero. Taken literally, that made a single office look like three worksites.

We merge registrations by address and add their headcounts. This is not an estimate: the company-level employee figure equals the sum of its registrations for every multi-registration company in the dataset, so the source itself treats them as non-overlapping.

After merging	38,900 companies have more than one address. The rest have one, and it is the company's own
What you get	Name, address in English and Korean, employees, industry and postal code — per address, inside the company record. has=sites filters to the multi-address companies
Long lists	Cut at 20 addresses, largest first. site_count still reports the true number

Two employee numbers, on purpose

ei_workers	Employment Insurance enrollees. Annual, from the master file.
nps_latest	National Pension subscribers in nps_period. Monthly. Excludes subscribers aged 60 and over and includes registered directors, so it differs from the insurance figure by design.

We do not reconcile them into a single "headcount". They are two government counts of two different things, and the gap between them is information.

What this dataset does not do

No assessment	No score, no grade, no ranking, no opinion about any company. We state facts and where they came from.
No negative records	No sanctions, penalties, litigation or industrial-accident history. Not "coming later" — out of scope by design.
No people	No representative names, no personal contact details. Company records only.
No inference	Nothing is modelled, imputed or estimated. If a value is absent, it is absent, and the record says so.

Known limits

• Pension records are linked by registration number and normalized company name. 91.9% of companies link; the rest have no monthly series. A record's employment_series field says which side a company is on.
• 83.3% have an observation in the most recent month, which is a smaller set — a company whose pension records stop earlier still has a series, just not one that reaches 2026-07. nps_latest is therefore not a test for "does this company have a series".
• Where a company has several same-named worksites, the sum is flagged rather than silently trusted — see nps_quality.
• English addresses are the government's own values for 97.3% of companies, taken from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety. The remaining 2.7% are rendered by rule because the official register could not resolve the source address — see Addresses.
• The master file refreshes annually, so ei_workers and the worksite list move once a year. The pension series is where recent movement shows up.

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Next: Addresses · Industry codes · how to call it