From May 2026 the number of Korean companies obliged to disclose in English rises to 265, and to 848 in March 2027. We opened it to see what a foreign investor actually receives. The listings are in English. Many of the documents behind them are not, and the reason is which regulator owns them.
Last verified: 5 August 2026. Built from two Financial Services Commission English press releases, our own reading of individual filings on the Financial Supervisory Service’s English DART system, and the Korea Exchange’s English KIND site. The phase-in dates and company counts come from the FSC, which can revise them again — the March 2027 date already moved once. The division of jurisdiction between the FSS and the Korea Exchange is structural and we expect it to hold.
Editor’s opinion
The mandate is real. The front door you land on is the problem.
Our view is that Korea has done the substantive part of this reform and left the navigation broken. English filing here is no token gesture. The covered universe goes from 111 companies to 848, and the largest issuers now file the English version on the day of the Korean one.
What a first-time reader meets is different. Search for a company you follow, click the result, and you may find one line naming the regulator with jurisdiction. Nothing else. No revenue, no share count. The catalogue has been translated; many of the books sit in another building.
The strongest evidence is that the FSS says so itself. Its notice states that the document is not the official English version, that the agency takes no responsibility for its contents, and that the Korean original sits on KIND. You are not misreading the page. It is telling you to leave.
What argues the other way
Two things. The first is that this is not a defect. Most English filings you will hit are material-event reports made under Korea Exchange rules, and the Exchange, not the FSS, owns them. A regulator declining to vouch for a document it does not control behaves correctly rather than evasively. The second is direction of travel. The January 2026 decision widened the covered items and pulled the final phase forward from May 2028 to March 2027. Neither reads as neglect. What survives is narrower: none of it helps you today, and the page you land on will not tell you where to go next.
Andrew Lee. This section argues a view rather than establishing a fact. It is not a forecast and not a recommendation, and the material it draws on is listed in the sources below.
Three regulators share one website
DART is one address holding three disclosure regimes. Statutory filings belong to the Financial Supervisory Service. Items marked Exchange Disclosure belong to the Korea Exchange. Items marked Fair Trade Commission Disclosure belong to the competition regulator, appearing because company-group rules require it, not securities law.
Think of three agencies sharing one mailbox. Every envelope looks alike, and the contents depend entirely on who posted it. Mistake the sender and you will hunt in the wrong building.
Two markers tell you where you stand. The jurisdiction line sits inside the document, usually at the top. The market marker sits beside the company name: S for KOSPI, K for KOSDAQ, N for KONEX, O for others. On the Korean site the same slot holds 유 or 코.
Where the document you want actually lives
- Does the filing carry a jurisdiction line naming another body?
- No FSS statutory filing — the English text is the document
- Yes Which body does it name?
- Korea Exchange Material-event report — full text on KIND
- Fair Trade Commission Group-disclosure item — full text on the FTC system
Check this line first. Where it names a body other than the FSS, the page in front of you is a stub. Source: our own reading of filings on the FSS English DART system, August 2026.
What English DART gives you, and what it does not
Take a specific filing. SK Square reported a decision on a paid-in capital increase on 10 July 2026, receipt 20260710801020. Open it in English and the body carries no figures at all.
It carries this instead. The disclosure “is under the jurisdiction of [Korea Exchange’s Securities Market Headquarters]”. It is “not the official English version of the legal disclosure” under article 161 of the Capital Markets Act. “The FSS is not responsible for the contents.” It “was disclosed voluntarily” under the Exchange’s rules. And “the original Korean version of the disclosure can be found on KIND”. A KCC results filing on 5 August, receipt 20260805800281, behaves identically.
Two details there are worth your attention. It directs you to the Korean original while printing the address of the English KIND site, so following it literally returns you to an English page. And the FSS warns separately that English filings “may not correspond to the original disclosures in Korean due to mistranslation”. Treat the translation as a pointer, then, and not as the record. Two limits on what we could establish: periodic reports such as the annual business report are not on the mandated list, and we could not confirm how much of a Korean original KIND renders in English.
How far the mandate actually reaches
The scope has moved three times. The first phase, from January 2024, covered 111 large KOSPI companies. From May 2026 it covers every KOSPI company with assets above two trillion won — 265 of them. From March 2027 it reaches 848, a date the FSC brought forward from May 2028 when it settled the third phase in January 2026.
Companies covered by the English requirement, by phase
Each bar starts when that phase takes effect and continues. The third phase carries a date but not yet force. Source: FSC press releases, December 2023 and January 2026.
The deadline tightened along with the count, and it now splits by size.
| Issuer | English version due |
|---|---|
| Assets above 10 trillion won | Same day as the Korean filing |
| Assets above 2 trillion won | Within three business days |
The item list widened too, to all 55 categories of material disclosure plus fair disclosure and answers to exchange inquiries — close to everything a company announces between reports. Set against that: a count of covered companies does not measure what you can read, because one body sets the obligation and another holds the full text. The account-level route into these shares is in how foreign investors buy Korean stocks.
Where to go instead
For anything marked as Exchange jurisdiction, go to KIND directly at engkind.krx.co.kr. Its Today’s Disclosure page lists the day’s filings; the site also carries company search, governance reports and IR schedules.
Two identifiers save you most of the searching. The corpCode is an eight-digit company number that never changes: KCC is 00105271. The rcpNo is the receipt number of one filing, built from the date and a sequence, which is why 20260805800281 opens with that August date. Hold an rcpNo and you can address a document directly instead of finding it twice.
The habit worth forming is this. Read the English page for what it reliably tells you — that a company filed something, and when. Then carry the rcpNo to the Korean original and put that through a translator. You give up the FSS’s wording and keep the numbers.
None of this applies to statutory filings the FSS owns, where the English document is the document. The question to carry is not whether the mandate covers a company, but which regulator owns the filing in front of you.
Sources
We take facts from these and write our own sentences. Where a figure originates in a company filing we say so, and where it originates in a research house estimate we name the house. We link to a document only where we hold the exact address for it; a link to a publisher’s front page would not get you to the source, so where we do not have the direct address we give you enough to find it.
Regulator announcements
- Financial Services Commission, press release on the expansion of mandatory English disclosure, 28 January 2026. Source for the 265 and 848 company counts, the March 2027 date brought forward from May 2028, the widening to all 55 categories of material disclosure plus fair disclosure and inquiry responses, and the same-day and three-business-day deadlines.
- Financial Services Commission, Provision of Corporate Disclosures in English from 2024 to Enhance Information Access for Foreign Investors, 18 December 2023. Source for the first phase covering 111 large KOSPI companies and the original three-business-day deadline.
Filings and system notices we read directly
- Financial Supervisory Service, English DART, SK Square, Report on Major Issues (Decision on Paid-In Capital Increase), 10 July 2026, receipt number 20260710801020. Source for the jurisdiction line and for the disclaimer quoted above, which also cites article 171 of the Enforcement Decree alongside article 161 of the Act.
- Financial Supervisory Service, English DART, KCC, results filing of 5 August 2026, receipt number 20260805800281. Read directly at englishdart.fss.or.kr. Second instance of the same stub behaviour, and the source for the eight-digit corpCode 00105271.
- Financial Supervisory Service, English DART system notices. Source for the statement that English disclosures are provided voluntarily with no legal effect and may not correspond to the Korean originals owing to mistranslation, and for the S, K, N and O market markers.
- Korea Exchange, Corporate Disclosure Channel KIND, English site. Source for the Today’s Disclosure, company search, corporate governance and IR sections referred to above. We did not establish how much of each Korean original the site renders in English.
Corrections
None yet. If you can point to a primary document that contradicts anything above, we will correct it and say what changed.
Disclosure. This article is general information about disclosure regulation and where filings appear. It is not investment advice, and it is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security or to use any platform. Naming a company here is a citation of its filing, not a view on it. The section headed Editor’s opinion is comment: it argues a view, and we fence it off from the sourced material for that reason. This site has no commercial relationship with any company, exchange or regulator named above. See the Editorial & Sourcing Policy and Disclaimer.