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한국어

How to write a Korean address in English

To write a Korean address in English, put the apartment or unit details first, then the building number and road name, followed by the district and city or province. Use the English road address and five-digit postal code for your destination; when a shopping form has separate fields, split those parts between the appropriate fields.

Last reviewed · K-Address team

Worked example from K-Address

The apartment details below are fictional. Replace them with your own details.

101-dong, 1203-ho, 152, Teheran-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul

What order should a Korean address follow in English?

Write a Korean address in English from the smallest part to the largest: apartment details, building number and road, then the surrounding administrative areas. The Ministry of the Interior and Safety illustrates this as 705-dong 1104-ho, 56 Dalgubeol-daero 323beon-gil, Suseong-gu, Daegu. The apartment building and unit come before the road address. Commas separate the detail and larger address elements. K-Address follows that order when it adds your details to the English base address; its official-style output also inserts a comma between the building and unit. The worked example below is generated by that formatter, with fictional apartment details. Treat the source example as an explanation of order, not as your own destination. Search for your actual road and building number, check the matching district and city, and add only the apartment details that belong to the recipient.

How do I keep road names and apartment details accurate?

Keep the romanized road and place names from the address result, then add the apartment details you have checked separately. The official address guidance preserves road endings such as -daero, -ro and -gil rather than replacing them with an invented English street name. The National Institute of Korean Language gives administrative examples such as Dobong-gu and Sinchang-eup. These endings help you recognize address elements when comparing Korean and English versions. For an apartment, K-Address parses 101동 1203호 as building 101 and unit 1203. Its official-style mode produces 101-dong, 1203-ho, while its simple mode produces Apt 1203, Bldg 101. Both examples use fictional details, so replace the numbers before using them. Neither mode looks up the recipient’s apartment number from the public base address. Compare each number with the address you were given, especially the apartment building number and the separate street building number.

Where do the city, province and postal code go?

Use the separate City, State / Province and Postal Code fields when the shopping form provides them. K-Address maps its Seoul example to City: Gangnam-gu, State / Province: Seoul, and Postal Code: 06236. These are the repository’s worked values for the example base address, so search for your own destination before copying them. Keep the initial zero in a postal code: Korea’s five-digit postal code system took effect on August 1, 2015. Korea Post provides a postal code search for checking an address. A shopping form’s field arrangement is separate from the official smallest-to-largest order used for a complete English address. In the default K-Address preset, the road goes in Line 1 and the apartment details go in Line 2. Check the whole saved address to ensure that the road, apartment details and administrative areas are all still present.

Convert your Korean address

The converter’s search interface is in Korean. It returns English addresses and shopping form fields.

Sources

Official guidance and K-Address examples are identified separately. Shopping form examples are not platform-specific official instructions for South Korea.