a country · South KoreaSouth Korea

The fastest-moving inbound flow in Asia, and one of the few a state counts on a published series. Korea recorded 1.17 million foreign patients in 2024, nearly double the 610,000 of 2023, and 5.05 million cumulatively since it began attracting them in 2009. The work is mostly dermatology and plastic surgery; clinics took 82.0 per cent of it and the Seoul metropolitan area 85.4 per cent.

The Ministry of Health and Welfare published the 2024 figures on 3 April 2025. The top countries of origin were Japan, China, the United States, Thailand and Taiwan, in that order. The growth rates behind the total are the interesting part: Taiwan up 550.6 per cent, Japan up 135.0 per cent, China up 132.4 per cent.

Inference — those are short-haul numbers. A destination whose fastest-growing markets are two-hour flights, whose patients go to clinics rather than hospitals, and whose leading specialties are dermatology and plastic surgery is selling a weekend, not an admission. That is a different product from a knee replacement with three ward nights, and reading the 1.17 million as a million operations would be wrong.

Separate card-spending data for 2024 put 919,000 foreign nationals spending 1.4 trillion won at Korean medical providers, an average of about 1.53 million won each — roughly a thousand US dollars a head at the rates of the day. That average is a dermatology average.

Trade practice — the count exists because facilities that treat foreign patients register with the ministry and report, so the series is administrative rather than survey-based. That is why it moves so sharply: a registration series grows when registration grows.

Foreign patients arrive on ordinary short-stay entry for clinic work and on a medical visa for admissions. Clinics in Gangnam and Myeongdong price per procedure and quote in won, hospitals package screening, and interpreters in Mandarin, Japanese, Russian and English are ordinary at the larger facilities. Advertising is regulated, and what a Korean clinic may say to a foreign patient is not what a facilitator abroad may say about it.

The 2024 total is the highest since the programme began in 2009. Korea's own hospital beds, doctors and health spending per person sit on the country page's chart from the World Bank series with their own years, and describe the system Koreans use rather than the clinics in this directory.