South Korea’s Newlyweds Keep Shrinking—and So Does the Will to Have Children (Yonhap)
SEOUL, Dec. 12 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s newlywed population slipped below the one-million mark for the second year in a row in 2024, a symbolic threshold for a country already preoccupied with its demographic future.
Government data released Friday show just 952,000 couples had been married for five years or less last year—a 2.3 percent decline from 2023, and part of a steady contraction that began long before the pandemic.
The figures contain their own contradictions. Even as the pool of newlyweds shrinks, the number of couples in their first and second year of marriage ticked up modestly, hinting at a small resurgence of early-stage unions.
But nearly half of all newly married couples remain childless. Only 51.2 percent reported having children, a slide of more than a percentage point from the previous year.
South Korea’s birthrate crisis has a familiar set of culprits: housing costs that edge out all but the well-off, a job market that feels precarious even to the employed, and shifting ideas about marriage and family that no longer hold the moral force they once did.
The average cost of a wedding in South Korea has reached ₩21.01 million won . (Image courtesy of Yonhap)
Parenthood, for many young Koreans, has become a luxury item—one that demands more time, stability, and certainty than the modern economy seems willing to offer.
Yet 2024 offered a rare glimmer of demographic optimism. The country’s total fertility rate—still the lowest in the world—rose for the first time in nine years, inching up to 0.75 children per woman.
It is a small improvement, but in a nation accustomed to watching that number fall, any upward tilt now reads like a plot twist.
Whether these movements represent a turning point or merely a brief pause in a long downward trend is a question policymakers, and increasingly the public, can no longer avoid.
Lina Jang (linajang@koreabizwire.com)
