Your E-2 Visa Issuance Number Isn't a Visa Yet
A visa issuance number means Korean immigration approved your E-2 paperwork, but you still don't have a visa — you take that number, your passport, and a consulate application to a Korean embassy in your home country to get the actual visa sticker.
Park English2026-09-113 min read
Every year we get a message that goes something like: "My school says my visa is approved, I booked my flight for next week, what do I bring?" And every year the answer is the same. Nothing, yet. You can't board with an approval number. You need the sticker in your passport, and that only comes from a Korean embassy or consulate in your country of citizenship.
Here's what actually happens after your school submits your documents to their local immigration office in Korea. Immigration reviews everything — your degree, your apostilled or Konsulate-authenticated criminal record check, your sealed transcript, the works — and if it's clean, they issue what's officially called a Confirmation of Visa Issuance, sometimes still called by its old name, the visa issuance number (사증발급인정번호). Your school gets this first. They forward it to you, usually by email or KakaoTalk, sometimes just as a screenshot of a number.
That number is proof Korean immigration signed off. It is not a visa. It's a note to the Korean consulate abroad saying "let this person's E-2 application through the fast lane." You still have to physically apply at that consulate.
What the second half of the process actually looks like:
- Take the issuance number, your passport, a completed visa application form, a passport photo, and (for most consulates) the application fee to a Korean embassy or consulate in your home country.
- Some consulates want an appointment booked in advance — the Korean Consulate General in New York and LA, for instance, have run appointment-only systems during busy hiring seasons like August and February. Book the moment you have the number, not the week before your flight.
- Processing at the consulate is usually a handful of business days once you're seen, but the appointment itself can be the bottleneck, not the processing.
- You get your passport back with the E-2 visa sticker in it. Now you can travel.
A few things people get wrong on this step specifically:
| Assumption | Reality |
|---|---|
| "I can use the issuance number at any embassy" | Generally you apply in your country of citizenship — check with the specific consulate if you're living somewhere else |
| "The number lasts forever" | Issuance numbers have a validity window, commonly cited around three months, but confirm the exact date on your document — it varies |
| "My school handles this part too" | Your school's job usually ends once the number is issued. The consulate visit is on you |
| "I don't need an appointment" | Depends entirely on the consulate and the season — August is brutal almost everywhere |
We'll be honest: we don't have a single reliable number for how long appointments take at every Korean consulate worldwide, because it changes by location and by month. A teacher applying from Toronto in June had a very different wait than one applying from Chicago in August. Call the specific consulate. Don't trust a forum post from two years ago.
One more thing worth saying plainly: if your school tells you to book flights before you've been seen at the consulate, push back. We've watched more than one teacher eat a change fee because "it'll definitely be approved in time" turned out to be wrong.