What Is Cheongyak? Korea's Housing Subscription Explained

A 청약통장 (cheongyak tongjang, housing subscription account) is not a savings product in any ordinary sense. It is a queue ticket for the right to buy a newly built Korean apartment at a regulated price, and the queue is ordered by a points score in which the largest single component is how many years you have gone without owning a home. Because points accrue with time, opening the account early is rational, which is why Korean parents open them for children. There were about 26.3 million accounts in September 2025 in a country of roughly 51 million people, and the number has been falling.

Element	How it works
The product	주택청약종합저축, a deposit account at a designated bank
The payment	20,000 to 500,000 won a month, freely chosen
What it buys	Eligibility to apply for new-build apartments, not the apartment
The ranking	A points score out of 84, mostly time-based
The trend	Accounts down about 2.25 million in three years and three months

What does a cheongyak account actually do?

New high-rise apartments under construction in South Korea

Korea does not mainly sell new apartments on an open market. Large new complexes are sold by 분양 (bunyang), a pre-construction offering at a price subject to regulation, often below what the finished unit will be worth. That gap is the whole story: being allowed to buy at the offering price is valuable, so the state has to decide who gets to.

The subscription account is the admission mechanism. You open a 주택청약종합저축 (jutaek cheongyak jonghap jeochuk, comprehensive housing subscription savings) at a designated bank, pay into it monthly, and thereby become eligible to apply when a complex you qualify for goes on sale. The account does not reserve a unit. It gets you into the draw, and your position in that draw depends on your record.

For the subscriber the account is a very ordinary deposit with a modest interest rate. Its value is entirely in the eligibility it confers.

How is the queue ordered? The 84-point system

For general supply of private-sector apartments, applicants are ranked by 가점제 (gajeomje), a points system set out in the Rules on Housing Supply. The score totals 84 points from three components:

Component	Maximum	How it accrues
무주택기간, period without owning a home	32	From 2 points under one year, rising about 2 points a year, maxing at 15 years
부양가족, dependents	35	5 points per dependent, maxing at 6 or more
가입기간, account subscription period	17	1 point a year, maxing at 15 years

Point allocations and the 250,000-won monthly recognised amount were checked against current housing-supply guidance on 17 October 2026; offering-specific rules can change by amendment.

Read that table as a description of a person. The maximum score belongs to someone who has not owned a home for fifteen years, supports six dependents, and has held the account for fifteen years. The system is not rewarding savings discipline or income. It is rewarding duration: specifically, the duration of not having what you are applying for.

The Rules on Housing Supply also set what proportion of a given offering is allocated by points versus by lottery, which is why a young applicant with a low score still has a path, just a narrower one. Public-sector 국민주택 offerings use different criteria, weighting the total amount paid in, and the monthly amount counted toward that total was raised from 100,000 to 250,000 won, so the strategically correct monthly payment differs depending on which kind of housing you are aiming at.

Why do Korean parents open accounts for their children?

Because two of the three components are clocks.

Account subscription period is worth up to 17 points and accrues at a point a year. Nothing about being an adult is required to start that clock. So a parent who opens an account for a child is buying the child a seventeen-point head start on a 84-point scale, redeemable in fifteen years. It costs very little and cannot be obtained later at any price.

This is the clearest example of a pattern that runs through Korean household finance: where the state allocates something scarce by time served, families begin serving the time as early as possible. The same logic produces early English education and long-horizon education spending, and it is the same logic that turns a bank account into an inheritance.

Is the system fair?

The interior of a new apartment sales gallery in South Korea

It depends entirely on which unfairness you weigh.

The case for it is strong. Points go to people who have been shut out of ownership longest and who support the most dependents, which is a defensible priority ordering and far more transparent than a pure lottery or an auction that would simply route cheap units to whoever had the most cash. Every applicant can calculate their own score, and the criteria are published.

The case against is that the metric rewards a particular life shape. Six dependents is 35 points, the largest single block, which systematically advantages large multi-generational households over single people and couples without children, in a country with the world’s lowest birth rate and a third of households containing one person. Meanwhile fifteen years of not owning means the people best placed to buy a discounted apartment are those who have been locked out of the market the longest, which is intended, but it also means someone who bought a small home and sold it resets a clock worth 32 points.

And the deepest objection is structural: the system rations access to a price gap rather than closing it. As long as regulated offering prices sit below market value, there is a windfall to allocate, and allocating it well is a harder problem than not creating it.

Why are Koreans closing their subscription accounts?

This is the live development, and it undercuts the idea that the account is an unquestioned national habit.

Account numbers peaked around 28.599 million in June 2022, fell to 26.433 million by February 2025, and stood at 26.349 million in September 2025, a decline of about 2.249 million accounts over three years and three months, with roughly 23,335 closures in that September alone. Seoul Economic Daily’s reporting on the fall, which revived talk of the account being useless in practice, attributes it to a compounding of causes:

Offering prices surged, narrowing the discount that made the queue worth joining.
Winning scores climbed, so a realistic applicant now needs a very high score, which makes a mid-range score functionally worthless.
Credit tightened. Under the 10·15 measures, the loan-to-value ratio in 37 regulated areas fell from 70 to 40 percent, with maximum loan amounts capped at 600, 400 or 200 million won depending on the property’s price. Winning the draw does not help if you cannot finance the purchase.

The government raised the account’s interest rate three times between 2022 and 2024 to slow the exodus. Subscribers left anyway, which tells you what the account was ever for: nobody held it for the interest.

Current figures are published by the Korea Real Estate Board through its Cheongyakhome subscription statistics, released as open data, so the trend can be checked rather than inferred.

Should a foreign resident open one?

Possibly, with caveats, and this is not advice.

Foreign nationals resident in Korea can generally open a subscription account, and some new-build offerings are open to them. The practical obstacles are the points system rather than the account: dependents must be registered household members in Korea, the period without owning a home is assessed on Korean records, and some offerings carry residency-period requirements in the relevant region. A foreign resident planning to remain in Korea long term and currently renting may find the clock worth starting. One planning to leave within a few years will not recover the opportunity cost.

Check current eligibility with a designated bank and with the official Cheongyakhome service before acting, since supply rules, recognised payment amounts and regional requirements change frequently.

FAQ

How much should I pay into a Korean subscription account each month?

Monthly payments run from 20,000 to 500,000 won. For public 국민주택 offerings, the amount counted toward the total was raised to 250,000 won a month, so that figure is often cited as the efficient maximum. For private-sector offerings judged on points rather than totals, the deposit size matters less than the time the account has been open.

What is a good cheongyak score?

High enough is a moving target set by competition for each specific offering, and winning scores in popular Seoul districts have risen substantially. Since the maximum is 84 and the top scores cluster well above 60 in competitive areas, a score in the 30s is realistically a lottery-track application rather than a points-track one.

Does owning a home abroad affect my Korean score?

The period-without-owning assessment is based on Korean housing records, but eligibility rules for specific offerings can treat overseas property differently. Verify for the particular offering rather than assuming.

Can I withdraw the money?

Yes, but closing the account destroys the accrued subscription period, which is the asset. That is why the account is held for decades and why closures are read as a loss of faith in the system rather than a cash need.

Is the subscription account the same as jeonse or cheongyak deposits?

No. The subscription account is about the right to buy a new apartment. Jeonse is a rental arrangement with a large refundable deposit, and the two are unrelated instruments that both involve lump sums.

The structural answer

The subscription account is what a country builds when it decides new housing should not simply be auctioned. Korea regulates the price of new apartments below their market value, which creates a windfall, and then allocates that windfall by a published score dominated by two clocks and a household headcount. The system is unusually transparent and unusually explicit about what it values: time spent without a home, and people to house. It also quietly instructs every family on how to behave, which is to start the clock on a child and keep it running, and it depends entirely on the gap between the offering price and the market staying wide enough to be worth queueing for. Two and a quarter million people have now concluded it is not, which is the most informative number in the system.

What Is Cheongyak? Korea’s Housing Subscription Explained