Korean residence certificates will simply say 'household member' or 'cohabitant' — effective October 2026

Until now a residence certificate spelled out the relationship precisely — 'child', 'spouse's child' and so on. That single field often exposed a remarriage or the shape of a family. After the change, only the householder's spouse keeps the label 'spouse'; parents, grandparents, siblings, children and other family all become 'household member', and anyone living in the household who is not family becomes 'cohabitant'. The principle is that one sheet of paper should not carry more personal information than it needs to.

The detailed labels do not disappear entirely. If the person requesting the certificate wants them, the specific relationships can still be printed, because there are situations — applying for multi-child benefits, for example — where spelling out the relationship helps. Minimal labelling becomes the default and detailed labelling becomes an option.

The same package brings a change for foreign nationals. A residence certificate will be able to show a foreign national's name in both Hangul and Roman letters. Until now family relation registry documents carried the Hangul name while the certificate carried the Roman one, so the two documents could look like they referred to different people, making identity awkward to prove. Move-in reporting also gets simpler: if you consent to administrative information sharing, you no longer need to submit a building register extract or family relation certificate separately, and a single application form covers both the move-in report and the move-in notification service.