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Nearly 1 million 'kangaroo' children tethered to parent's health insurance well into adulthood

Published: 31 May. 2026, 07:00

A person sits at the National Health Insurance Service office in Jongno District in central Seoul in 2024. [YONHAP]

Nearly 1 million adults aged 26 to 50 are still registered as dependents on a parent's health insurance, a measure of how many grown children in Korea remain financially tethered to their parents.

As of the end of last year, 942,718 people in that age range were covered as dependents on a parent's workplace health plan, the National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) said Thursday. Those people make up 6.1 percent of all 15,383,177 dependents.

The numbers point to a growing group of what are known as "kangaroos," adults who lean on their parents well into middle age, as a tight job market and long spells of unemployment keep them from standing on their own.

Among them is a 29-year-old man in the greater Seoul area who has spent more than five years "preparing for a job" since finishing his military service.

He lives with his parents and gets by on an allowance, and aside from a couple of brief part-time stints, he has never held a proper job. He goes about the search so half-heartedly that his parents see it as little different from resting.

He is registered as a dependent on his father's health insurance. His parents, both in their 60s, rarely push him, worried that pressure could tip him into becoming a recluse.

"I'm studying for the [civil service] exam, so it's not as if I can be out earning money," he said.

People attend a PKNU Dream Job Fair in Busan on Sept. 10, 2025 [YONHAP]

Employer-based health insurance counts as dependents any children who live with the subscriber, as well as children who live apart but are divorced or widowed, and charges them no premiums. Age is not taken into account.

Among the dependents, 212,240 had been on a parent's plan for five straight years, as the 29-year-old man has. Of those, 141,251 were aged 26 to 30, 57,118 were aged 31 to 40 and 13,871 were aged 41 to 50. The figure leaves out anyone who had a job and paid premiums at some point during those years, so the real number of the so-called kangaroo children is likely far higher.

To set aside young people who are still in school, the NHIS also measured how long each person had been a dependent without interruption, using a longer time frame for older groups.

Job seekers crowd the Job Fair for International Students section of the Global Talent Fair at Coex in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, on May 19, 2025. A recent syrvey showed that 78.4 percent of Korean small and medium-sized enterprises and startups are considering hiring foreign employees. [YONHAP]

Among those aged 26 to 30, some 245,015 had been dependents continuously for one to five years, about 70,000 of them for three to five years, while there were 142,457 aged 31 to 40 who had been dependents for one to 10 years, including 33,136 for five to 10 years and 33,362 for three to five years.

Among those aged 41 to 50, 33,565 had been dependents for one to 20 years.

The ranks of long-term dependents have grown as the job market has tightened for people in their 20s and 30s, and more workers have gone without a job for six months or longer, leaving many unable to qualify for health insurance on their own. People in their 40s, for whom work is even harder to find, tend to remain dependents the longest.

The parents still covering children in their late 30s and 40s are mostly past 60. That means many have either remained in the work force or returned to work after retiring to continue supporting their grown children.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
BY SHIN SUNG-SIK [[email protected]]