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| South Korea's population may become a year younger on paper if the country's president-elect Yoon Suk-yeol succeeds in abolishing the concept of the "Korean age." |
| Lee Yong-ho, chief of Yoon's transition team's political, judicial, and administrative subcommittee, said during a press conference on Monday that they are pushing to standardize the way age is counted in South Korea, per Yonhap News. The change is being pursued for practical reasons, Lee noted. |
| "Due to the different calculations of legal and social age, we have experienced unnecessary social and economic costs from persistent confusion and disputes over calculating age when receiving social, welfare and other administrative services or signing or interpreting various contracts," he said. |
| South Korea currently has several ways of counting one's age. |
| One of them is the "Korean age" system that Yoon's government is looking to do away with, which involves South Koreans being labeled as one year old at birth and adding another year upon the New Year. This is because the nine months a child spends in the womb — rounded up to one year — is counted as the first year of the child's life, per the system. |
| Besides the "Korean age" system and the internationally recognized means of tabulating one's age according to birthdays, South Korea also has a third method for calculating age. The process involves adding another year to a person's age on New Year's Day, regardless of their actual birthday, while also considering a person to be "zero years old" at birth. |
| These three systems essentially mean that someone born in December 2020 could technically have three different ages — the person would be three years old according to "Korean age," aged one according to the international age system, and two years old per the third way of counting one's age in South Korea. |
| According to reporting from The Korea Herald, there were calls for legal age counting to be standardized this January when health authorities used the international age and Korean ages interchangeably to set guidelines for COVID-19 vaccine guidelines and policies. |
| The three co-existing age-counting systems led to an administrative debacle in which people who did not meet the required age to get their COVID-19 jabs were still required to show proof of vaccination. |
| "There would be much less confusion if we could have the same idea of what it means to be how old we actually are," Lee said, adding that his team would push for this change to be implemented by early 2023. |
| Lee added that the process would involve amending the existing law, not proposing new legislation. |
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