Does leaving Korea reset your 5 years for permanent residence?

If you are counting years towards permanent residence (F-5), one question comes up more than any other: does going home for a few months wipe out the time you have already built up?

The short answer is no, not usually. The Ministry of Justice manual has always allowed short trips. What it never explained is how a "year" is measured, and that mattered, because the page carried two asterisks with no footnotes under them. The 18 September 2026 edition fills them in and adds a worked example. Here it is in plain words.

Short trips do not break your run

Your days in Korea are added up. A trip abroad does not reset anything, as long as:

• each single trip is 90 days or less, and
• your days outside Korea add up to 180 days or less in the year.

Stay inside both limits and the time you were away is counted as part of your stay, not taken off it.

Two things do count as time outside Korea: an extension granted so that you can leave, and a departure grace period.

What "a year" means

This is the new part. A year here is 365 days counted backwards from the day you apply, and that day is included. It is not a calendar year, so it does not start in January. Your five years are five of those blocks, working back from your application date.

The example the manual works through

Say you apply for general permanent residence (F-5-1) on 1 January 2026, and the route asks for five continuous years. The manual splits them like this:

1. 2 Jan 2021 to 1 Jan 2022
2. 2 Jan 2022 to 1 Jan 2023
3. 2 Jan 2023 to 1 Jan 2024
4. 2 Jan 2024 to 1 Jan 2025
5. 2 Jan 2025 to 1 Jan 2026

Each block is checked on its own. If block 2 goes over the limits and the other four are fine, your continuous stay counts as three years, not five. You would need to stay another two years from the day you applied.

That is the part worth knowing. A bad year is not simply deducted. It cuts the run, and only the blocks after it count.

What really does break the run

• Leaving Korea for good.
• Moving to a visa status that does not count towards the permanent residence category you are applying under.

If you are applying on a degree or a certificate (F-5-10)

The same edition cleared up a second point, and this one can change who qualifies.

That route asks for three years of work, and the manual now says plainly that those three years are counted from the day your degree or certificate was issued. Work you did before finishing does not count towards it.

Two more things the route asks for, which are easy to miss:

• On the day you apply you must be in a regular, full-time job at a Korean company, and have held it for a year or more.
• Gaps while changing employer are allowed: up to 90 days in total across the three years, and up to 30 days across the year with your current employer.

Check your own case

Our Visa Finder has all of this encoded. The F-5 check asks about your situation, then tells you which routes are close to open for you and exactly what each one still needs.

Check if you may qualify for F-5

Every manual change we track is listed on the visa changes page, and the other visas are on the Korea Visa Finder.

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Read on 19 September 2026 from the Ministry of Justice (법무부) 체류민원 자격별 안내 매뉴얼, 18 September 2026 edition, pages 446 and 460. This is guidance, not a decision: immigration officers decide each case. If your situation is close to any of these limits, confirm it with your immigration office or the 1345 hotline before you apply.

Tags: #KoreaVisa #PermanentResidence #F5 #LivingInKorea #VisaFinder #WaegookGuide