South Korea’s ruling Democratic Party is pressing the government to apply the same 1.4 billion won (about $1.0 million) basic deduction under the Comprehensive Real Estate Tax to one-home owners regardless of whether they actually live in the property — a change that would directly affect Koreans who own a home in the country but live, work, or reside abroad.
Under the government’s own plan, finalized at a September cabinet meeting, resident one-home owners get a 1.4 billion won deduction while non-resident one-home owners — a category that includes many overseas Koreans — get only 1.2 billion won (about $890,000). A Blue House official said Saturday the government intends to keep that September plan and that “further changes are difficult,” rejecting the ruling party’s push to raise the non-resident figure to match.
The gap matters because of how it compounds through the tax formula. In a simulation shared by Woo Byung-tak, a specialist at Shinhan Premier Pathfinder, the 200-million-won difference in basic deduction translates into total property tax bills 16 to 21 percent apart across major Seoul apartment complexes next year, assuming official price growth next year runs at half this year’s rate. Looking only at the Comprehensive Real Estate Tax portion, the gap is sharper still: on an 84-square-meter unit at Centras in Seongdong District, Woo’s simulation put the tax at about 683,000 won with the 1.2 billion won deduction versus about 235,000 won with the 1.4 billion won deduction — a roughly 2.9-fold difference on the same home. High-priced units such as an 84-square-meter unit at Banpo Xi showed no difference either way, at about 26.41 million won, because of an existing 150 percent cap on year-over-year tax-burden increases.
The National Assembly Budget Office has separately warned that giving owner-occupants a tax edge over landlords could shrink the rental supply, since it could prompt more landlords to move into their own units rather than rent them out — a dynamic Kwon Dae-jung, a real estate economics professor at Hansung University, echoed, while also arguing that raising the deduction by 200–300 million won “would not have a big impact” given the Comprehensive Real Estate Tax has already been tightened in recent years. Park Sung-joon, the Democratic Party’s chief spokesperson, said Seoul-area lawmakers are especially sensitive to the issue because next year’s housing, land, and comprehensive real-estate tax bills will land ahead of South Korea’s April 2028 general election.
This follows an earlier dispute over South Korea’s 2027–2029 tax and property rules reported by Zagdim, in which the capital-gains “cutoff date” shaped how Gangnam landlords and buyers structure deals — a related but separate piece of the same tax-reform push.
