“Marriage Set Two Female High School Classmates on Divergent Paths in Old Age”... The Door to Pensions for Homemakers Reopens After 13 Years

[Financial News] A sweeping overhaul of the enrollment system is being pursued to bring 6.67 million people—including spouses with no income who have been categorically excluded from National Pension coverage because they lived as full-time homemakers after marriage, as well as young adults with no income—into the system.
The aim is to move from the “one pension per household” model centered on a single breadwinner, designed when the system was introduced in 1988, to a “one pension per person” system that recognizes every adult as an independent beneficiary. The effort has been revived 13 years after an attempt to overhaul the system fell through in 2013.
According to a report on government work submitted to the National Assembly’s Health and Welfare Committee by the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the National Pension Service on the 22nd, the government is drawing up a plan to overhaul the enrollment system by classifying spouses with no income and others as “contribution-exempt” regional subscribers.
Under the current National Pension Act, of the 29.4 million people aged 18 to 59, 20.93 million are National Pension subscribers and around 1.8 million are covered by special occupational pension schemes (for civil servants, military personnel and private-school employees). The remaining approximately 6.67 million are classified as “excluded from coverage” and remain outside the system.
In particular, the current system has a structural contradiction: even among people with no income, access to benefits depends on whether they are married. Unmarried people with no income retain their status as regional subscribers and become “contribution-exempt,” deferring premium payments; married people with no income who have an earning spouse are instead “excluded from coverage” and removed from the enrollment system altogether.
When they later earn income, contribution-exempt subscribers can use the “retroactive contribution” system to pay premiums for past periods, for up to 119 months, and can also receive premium assistance for low-income people. By contrast, full-time homemakers with no prior contribution history are barred from retroactive contributions altogether.
According to the office of Democratic Party of Korea lawmaker Heo Jong-sik, as of June this year, 91.6% (3,535,479) of the 3,857,798 people aged 27 to 59 who were excluded from coverage had a history of paying premiums, through previous employment and other work. As many as 2.16 million had paid premiums for more than four years. This means most had been pushed out of the system after their careers were interrupted by marriage, childbirth or childcare, following a period of economic activity.
This outdated enrollment structure is directly contributing to a severe gender gap in poverty in old age. According to National Pension Service statistics, as of December 2025, women received an average monthly old-age pension of 429,206 won, just half the 851,670 won received by men.
Among people receiving less than 400,000 won a month in pension benefits, there were 1,672,182 women—about 590,000 more than men. By contrast, around 980,000 men received at least 1 million won a month, while the number of women was only just over 53,000. Even 97.3% (9,957 people) of the cumulative beneficiaries of the “childbirth credit,” introduced to encourage childbirth, ended up credited to pensions in their husbands’ names, since the husbands had longer contribution histories and higher incomes.
With the system failing to ensure security in old age, women have continued to fend for themselves by voluntarily shouldering the costs. Women make up 80.3% (268,113) of voluntary subscribers (333,717) who pay the full premium themselves despite having no legal obligation to do so. Women also outnumber men by 2.2 to 1 among voluntary continued subscribers (454,886), who keep paying premiums after age 60 to meet the minimum enrollment period of 10 years (120 months).
If, as the government envisions, spouses with no income are reclassified as contribution-exempt regional subscribers, they will retain their subscriber status even if they do not pay premiums right away. Later, when they have income or can afford to pay, they will be able to make retroactive contributions for those periods, meet the 10-year minimum enrollment requirement and receive an independent pension for life.
However, significant challenges remain in ensuring financial sustainability and fairness. In the past, controversies arose over “pension investment” schemes in which high-income full-time homemakers, including in the Gangnam area, voluntarily enrolled and then paid a lump sum for 10 years’ worth of retroactive contributions to secure high-return pensions. This has prompted calls for carefully designed safeguards against regressive outcomes, including how the standard monthly income used to calculate retroactive contributions is determined and whether installment payments are allowed.
Pension experts said, “If the door is merely opened to enrollment, only affluent people with the financial means may benefit, while the low-income and vulnerable groups who genuinely need help could be left out,” and recommended that “a true one-pension-per-person system can take hold only if practical financial support measures are combined as a package, including expanded government subsidies for regional subscribers’ premiums and upfront credits for childbirth and caregiving.”
[email protected] Mun Yeong-jin Reporter