Housing Allowance or Provided Apartment: Which One Actually Leaves You With More Money
A provided apartment usually leaves you with more money than a housing allowance, because most Korean housing allowances (often 300,000–500,000 won a month) don't fully cover rent in Seoul or Gyeonggi, and the gap comes out of your salary.
Park English2026-09-043 min read
Every hagwon contract handles housing one of two ways. Either the school finds you a place and pays for it directly, or it hands you a monthly stipend and you sort out your own apartment. On paper these look like two versions of the same benefit. In practice they behave very differently once you actually move in.
Provided housing usually means a studio or one-room officetel, sometimes shared with another teacher, sometimes not. The school signs the lease, pays the deposit (often called key money, or bojeunggeum), and you pay utilities. You never see the rent number. That's fine until you want to know what it's actually worth, or until the apartment turns out to be a 45-minute bus ride from the school with a boiler from 2009.
Housing allowance is a fixed cash amount added to your paycheck, meant to cover rent you find yourself. It sounds like more freedom, and it is. But the number quoted in the contract is rarely the whole story. In Seoul and parts of Gyeonggi, a studio close to a subway line can run 500,000–700,000 won a month even with a modest deposit, and a lot of allowances land under that.
So the real question isn't "which sounds better." It's "which one actually costs you less at the end of the month."
| Provided housing | Housing allowance | |
|---|---|---|
| Deposit / key money | School pays, held against damages | You pay, or negotiate upfront help |
| Rent shortfall risk | None — you're not paying rent | You cover anything above the allowance |
| Location control | School picks, sometimes far from work | You pick |
| Move-out hassle | School handles the lease | You handle it, including deposit return |
| What you actually bank | Whole allowance line disappears — value is invisible | Difference between allowance and rent, if any |
The number that trips people up is the deposit. If you take the allowance and find your own place, most landlords in Korea still want a deposit of several million won upfront, even for a modest officetel, in exchange for lower monthly rent. Some schools will front part of that as a loan against your first few paychecks. Some won't mention it until you ask. Ask before you sign, not after you've found the apartment.
A few things worth checking before you decide which deal you're actually being offered:
- Is the allowance a flat number in the contract, or "up to" a ceiling reimbursed against receipts? These are not the same thing.
- If housing is provided, who pays for the deposit if you want to leave that apartment for a different one mid-contract?
- Are utilities, wifi and management fees included, or on top of either arrangement?
- If the school closes or your contract ends early, what happens to your deposit and who deals with the landlord?
That last one matters more than people think. We've had teachers whose hagwon paid the deposit, then folded eight months into a one-year contract, and the deposit refund got tangled up in the school's own mess for months. If your housing is tied to your employer's finances, your housing security is too.
Honestly, there's no universal right answer here. Some teachers would rather have the higher net number and manage their own lease. Others don't want to deal with Korean landlords at all and are happy to let the school handle it, even if the math works out slightly worse. Just do the math before you sign, not after your first month's utility bill.