Korea removed its three-decade-old foreign investor registration requirement in December 2023. Much of the English-language guidance still describes the old system. Here is the current position on how a foreign individual actually gets exposure to Korean equities, what it costs, and which routes are closed despite appearing open.
Last verified: 2 August 2026. We source every factual claim below to a Korean regulator, the Korea Exchange, or primary statute. The full list sits at the end, in Korean where the Korean text is authoritative.
What changed, and when
Three changes in the last three years have materially altered how foreign investors approach the Korean market. If a guide you are reading does not reflect all three, it is out of date.
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 14 Dec 2023 | The Financial Services Commission abolished the foreign investor registration requirement, in place since 1992. Individuals can now open accounts using a passport number; corporations use an LEI. Foreign investors no longer pre-register with the Financial Supervisory Service. |
| 31 Mar 2025 | Short selling fully resumed on all listed stocks after roughly five years of partial or total prohibition, with borrowing terms equalised between institutional and retail investors. |
| May 2026 | Mandatory English disclosure expanded to all KOSPI companies with at least KRW 2 trillion in assets — from 111 companies to 265. The regulator also brought the extension to all 848 KOSPI issuers forward to March 2027. |
The 2023 change is the one most often misreported. Guidance published before December 2023 — and a good deal published after — states that a foreign investor must first obtain an Investment Registration Certificate from the FSS. That requirement no longer exists.
The barrier moved rather than disappeared
Removing the registration requirement did not make Korean brokerage accounts broadly available to foreigners. It moved the obstacle from the regulator to the broker.
Under Korean law, a non-resident foreign individual may open a securities account with a Korean firm using a passport number. In practice, most Korean brokers do not onboard non-resident foreigners remotely. Their account-opening procedures assume an alien registration card, a Korean mobile number, and a Korean bank account — none of which a non-resident has. This is a commercial and know-your-customer decision by each firm, not a legal prohibition, which is why it varies between firms and can change without any change in the law.
The practical consequence is a split audience. If you live in Korea and hold an alien registration card, the domestic route is open to you and is generally the cheapest and most complete. If you do not live in Korea, it is usually closed in practice, and you will need one of the other routes below.
Four routes that give you ownership
| Route | Who it works for | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Korean brokerage account | Residents of Korea with an ARC | All listed stocks |
| Global broker with KRX access | Depends on the broker and your country | Broad, but not always complete |
| US-listed depositary receipts | Anyone with a US brokerage account | A handful of companies |
| Korea equity ETFs | Anyone with any brokerage account | Index exposure, no stock selection |
Which route is available to you
- Do you live in Korea and hold an alien registration card?
- Yes Korean brokerage account
- No Do you want a specific company, rather than Korea as an asset class?
- No Korea equity ETF
- Yes Does that company have a US listing?
- Yes US depositary receipt
- No Global broker with KRX access
Most Korean companies have no US listing, Samsung Electronics among them. For a specific company, the global broker route is usually the only one that reaches it.
Global brokers with direct KRX access
A small number of international brokers offer direct access to the Korea Exchange. This is the closest a non-resident can get to buying the actual listed share.
Interactive Brokers launched direct KRX trading access in May 2026, covering more than 2,700 listed securities including Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Hyundai Motor. A small number of other international and Asia-based brokers also offer Korean market access, with coverage and eligibility varying by firm and by country of residence.
Two things to check before assuming a broker works for you. First, whether the broker accepts clients resident in your country — this differs from whether the broker offers the market. Second, whether the broker supports the specific segment you need; KOSDAQ coverage is sometimes narrower than KOSPI, and some brokers exclude smaller issues entirely.
This site has no commercial relationship with any broker named here, and no affiliate arrangement is in place. Should that change, we will disclose it on the page it affects.
US-listed depositary receipts
A depositary receipt is a US-listed security representing shares held by a depositary bank. It trades in dollars, during US hours, in a normal US brokerage account. For an American investor it is the path of least resistance.
The constraint is coverage. Only a small number of Korean companies maintain US listings. Samsung Electronics is not among them. Its non-Korean line is a global depositary receipt traded in London, not a US-listed security, and it is materially less liquid than the Seoul listing. Anyone who believes they can buy Samsung Electronics on a US exchange is mistaken about the instrument.
SK Hynix listed depositary receipts on Nasdaq under the ticker SKHY on 10 July 2026, which is a recent and significant addition to what had been a static list.
Depositary receipts also carry costs that the underlying share does not: depositary service fees deducted from dividends, and a price that can drift from the Seoul line because the two trade in different sessions and currencies.
Korea equity ETFs
Exchange-traded funds listed in the US and Europe give index-level exposure to Korean equities in a single instrument. They require no special access, settle normally, and are available to essentially any retail investor.
What you give up is selection. Korea’s headline indices are heavily concentrated in a small number of large-cap technology names, so a broad Korea ETF is, in practice, a substantial position in two or three companies plus a long tail. If your interest in Korea is a specific company or a specific sector, an index fund will not express it.
A fifth route that is not ownership
Crypto exchanges now market tokenised equities — stock-tracking tokens — as a way to access foreign shares. The framing deserves care, because the most common description of these products is wrong in a way that matters.
There is no tokenised Korean stock market. The issuers’ legal structures depend on the underlying being a US-listed security, so an issuer can only tokenise a Korean company that already has a US listing. In practice this means one name: SK Hynix, tokenised from its Nasdaq depositary receipt rather than from its Seoul listing. The token is therefore a wrapper around a wrapper.
Samsung Electronics does appear on some crypto exchanges, but as a perpetual futures contract — a leveraged, cash-settled derivative with funding payments. It involves no share, no depositary receipt and no custody. It is not a tokenised equity, and readers should not confuse the two.
What sits beneath a tokenised Korean equity
Three counterparty layers separate the buyer from the company. Ownership and voting rights exist only at the last one.
What you actually own
Three structural points apply to tokenised equities generally, and a fourth is better shown than described.
- You hold a claim against an issuer, not a share. Depending on the product this is a derivative contract, a secured note, or a tracker certificate issued by a special purpose vehicle. In no case are you a shareholder.
- No voting rights. The European Securities and Markets Authority noted in September 2025 that these instruments “typically do not confer shareholder rights” and warned specifically about investor misunderstanding.
- Most readers cannot buy them anyway. The offerings rely on Regulation S, which excludes US persons entirely. In the UK and EEA, issuers generally sell only to qualified or professional investors, not to retail.
When each layer actually trades, in Korean time
Korean Standard Time. US hours reflect northern-summer daylight saving and shift by one hour in winter. The token trades continuously, including the roughly ten hours each weekday when neither market beneath it is open — and across weekends, when neither opens at all.
The precedent: Binance and FTX
Two earlier attempts are worth knowing about. Binance launched stock tokens in 2021 and withdrew them within months under pressure from German, UK and other regulators. FTX ran tokenised stocks through a similar structure; when FTX failed in November 2022, holders ended up with claims against the estate rather than securities. Current issuers have built stronger protections in response — segregated custody, independent security agents, bankruptcy-remote structures — but none has been tested in an actual insolvency.
None of this makes the instrument illegitimate. It makes it a different instrument from the one most buyers think they are getting.
How the market runs
Korea Exchange operates a continuous auction during the regular session, with call auctions at the open and close.
| Regular session | 09:00–15:30 KST |
| Pre-hours | 07:30–09:00 KST |
| After-hours | 15:40–18:00 KST |
| Settlement | T+2 |
| Daily price limit | ±30% of the base price |
| Trading unit | 1 share |
Market orders are not accepted in the after-hours session. Korea also operates market-wide circuit breakers and single-stock trading halts tied to disclosure events, including a 30-minute halt following material disclosures.
Tick sizes are identical on KOSPI and KOSDAQ up to KRW 100,000, then diverge. Above KRW 100,000 the KOSPI tick rises to KRW 500 and then to KRW 1,000 above KRW 500,000, while KOSDAQ caps its tick at KRW 100. For high-priced KOSPI shares this is a meaningfully wider minimum increment than most developed markets, and it matters when placing limit orders.
Tax
This is where the most consequential and least-reported fact sits.
Capital gains: most foreign retail investors are exempt
The Enforcement Decree of the Income Tax Act does not count a non-resident’s gain on shares sold through the exchange as Korean-source income, provided the seller, aggregated with related persons, held less than 25% of the issuer’s outstanding shares at any point in the year of sale and the preceding five years.
For an ordinary foreign retail investor, that threshold is not remotely in reach. The practical effect is that Korea does not tax your capital gains on listed shares sold on the exchange.
Three conditions govern the exemption, and each is a genuine limit rather than a formality.
- The sale must be on-exchange. Off-market transfers of listed shares are taxable regardless of size.
- The 25% test aggregates related persons rather than measuring you individually.
- The test looks back over the current year plus five prior years, not the moment of sale.
Where the exemption does not apply, withholding is the lesser of 10% of gross proceeds or 20% of the net gain, plus a local income surtax of 10% of the tax amount.
This addresses Korean tax only. Your own country will almost certainly tax the gain, and the absence of Korean tax means there is no foreign tax credit to offset it.
Dividends: withheld at source
Korea treats dividends differently, and here foreign investors do pay.
| Situation | Rate |
|---|---|
| Default statutory rate for non-residents | 22% (20% plus 10% local surtax) |
| US resident individual, under the Korea–US treaty | 15% |
| UK resident individual, under the Korea–UK treaty | 15% |
A frequent error is worth correcting. Both treaties contain a lower rate — 10% under the US treaty, 5% under the UK treaty — but those apply only to corporate shareholders holding a substantial stake. An individual retail investor gets 15% under either treaty. The 15% is a ceiling on total Korean tax, so the local surtax does not stack on top of it.
The treaty rate is not automatic. Korean law operates an application-based system: you must lodge a residence certificate from your home tax authority, together with the prescribed application, with the withholding agent — in practice your broker or custodian — before the dividend is paid. Miss the deadline and you are withheld at 22%, recoverable only through a refund claim filed via the withholding agent. If your broker does not handle treaty relief on your behalf, assume 22% and check.
Securities transaction tax
Korea levies a transaction tax on the seller, calculated on gross proceeds rather than gain. As of January 2026 the combined rate is 0.20% on both KOSPI and KOSDAQ, comprising the securities transaction tax and a rural development surtax.
Because it applies to proceeds rather than profit, it is payable on losing trades as well as winning ones. It also applies equally to residents and non-residents, and there is no treaty relief from it. For a high-turnover strategy it compounds quickly.
What still trips people up
Foreign ownership ceilings on a small set of companies
Korea abolished general foreign ownership limits in 1998, but ceilings remain on a small number of companies in strategic industries — principally telecommunications, broadcasting and aviation — under the Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act and sector-specific legislation. The FSC stated in January 2023 that 33 listed items were subject to such limits, out of roughly 2,500 listed companies.
These are aggregate ceilings across all foreign holders, so no individual investor is likely to approach one. The practical effect is that an order in an issue whose foreign quota is exhausted can be rejected. Shares acquired in breach of a limit carry no voting rights.
Disclosure is improving but incomplete
Mandatory English disclosure now covers approximately 265 KOSPI companies — those with at least KRW 2 trillion in total assets — following the second phase which took effect in May 2026. The largest companies must file in English on the same day as the Korean filing.
Two limits are worth knowing. The regime is KOSPI-only; KOSDAQ issuers are not covered at any stage. And beneath the KRW 2 trillion threshold, KOSPI companies remain outside it until the final phase in March 2027. Below those lines, filings, earnings materials and sell-side research remain Korean-only.
Short selling is back
Short selling resumed on all listed stocks on 31 March 2025, ending roughly five years of restriction. The resumption came with a centralised detection system for naked short selling, a 90-day repayment period renewable to twelve months, and equalised collateral terms between institutional and retail borrowers. The exchange can still designate individual stocks as overheated and curb short selling in them, and it continues to do so.
Currency
Buying the underlying share means holding won. Your return is the stock return combined with the won’s move against your home currency, and over multi-year holding periods the currency component has frequently been large enough to determine whether a position made money.
Choosing between the routes
There is no single best answer. In practice, two facts about you decide the question rather than preference.
- If you live in Korea, use a domestic broker. It is cheaper and complete.
- If you want a specific Korean company and do not live in Korea, you need a global broker with KRX access, unless that company happens to be one of the few with a US listing.
- If you want Korea as an asset class, an ETF does the job with no special access and no currency administration.
- If a route seems to offer access that regulation does not otherwise permit, establish what you are actually buying before you buy it.
Sources
Where a Korean-language source is authoritative, we cite it in Korean and note the English version where the regulator publishes one.
- 금융위원회, “Investing in Domestic Capital Markets Made Easier for Foreign Investors,” 13 December 2023 — abolition of the foreign investor registration requirement, effective 14 December 2023.
- 금융위원회, “Foreign Investor Registration Requirement to be Abolished in Korea,” 5 June 2023 — history of the system since 1992.
- 금융위원회, “Measures to Improve Foreign Investors’ Access to Korean Capital Markets,” 25 January 2023 — foreign ownership limits on 33 listed items.
- 금융위원회, press release on the resumption of short selling, March 2025 — resumption on 31 March 2025 and attached conditions.
- 금융위원회, rule approval of 28 January 2026 — expansion of mandatory English disclosure to 265 companies from May 2026.
- 한국거래소, Guide to Trading in the Korean Stock Market — session hours, T+2 settlement, ±30% daily price limit, tick sizes.
- 소득세법 시행령 제179조 제11항 (Enforcement Decree of the Income Tax Act, Article 179(11)) — 25% threshold and on-exchange condition for non-resident capital gains.
- 소득세법 제156조, 제156조의2 (Income Tax Act, Articles 156 and 156-2) — withholding on non-residents and the treaty relief application procedure.
- Korea–US Income Tax Convention, Article 12; Korea–UK Double Taxation Agreement, Article 10 — dividend withholding rates.
- 자본시장과 금융투자업에 관한 법률 제168조 (FSCMA, Article 168) — restrictions on foreigners’ acquisition of securities.
- European Securities and Markets Authority, keynote address, 1 September 2025 — tokenised instruments and shareholder rights.
Corrections
Tax and market rules change. If you believe anything above is inaccurate or out of date, write to [email protected] with the source. We will check it, correct the page where you are right, and note the change.
Disclosure. This article is general information about market access and regulation. It is not investment advice, and it is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security or to use any broker or platform. Tax treatment depends on your personal circumstances and your country of residence; consult a qualified adviser before acting. This site has no commercial relationship with any broker, exchange or platform named here. See the Editorial & Sourcing Policy and Disclaimer.