Methodology and limits
What is in this data, what is not, and how every figure on the site is calculated.
Where the prices come from
Korean law requires medical institutions to disclose what they charge for treatment that national health insurance does not cover. The Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service collects those disclosures and publishes them as open data.
Every figure on this site comes from that dataset and nowhere else. Nothing is estimated, surveyed, submitted by a hospital, or paid for.
This build contains 86,407 disclosed prices from 3,937 institutions, with disclosure dates from 3 September 2025 to 2 April 2026.
The most important limit: no clinic-level data
This dataset covers hospital-grade institutions only: tertiary hospitals, general hospitals, hospitals, long-term care hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, dental hospitals, and traditional Korean medicine hospitals.
Clinic-level practices return no rows at all. We verified this directly against the source rather than inferring it from the documentation.
The practical consequence: cosmetic surgery and dermatology are effectively absent, because in Korea they are overwhelmingly performed at clinics. Laser eye surgery is present but thinly, for the same reason. If you are researching plastic surgery prices, this dataset cannot help you, and neither can anyone else using it.
How the comparisons work
For each procedure we take every disclosed price and compute the median, the quartiles, and the range. A hospital’s price is compared against the median for its own region, not the national one — regional variation is large enough that a national comparison would mislead.
Where fewer than 3 hospitals in a region disclose a price, no benchmark is shown. A median of two numbers describes those two hospitals, not a going rate, and presenting it as one would be false precision.
Prices of zero are excluded. A hospital disclosing zero is recording that it does not charge for the item, which is not a price and would drag any median it entered.
Where an institution discloses the same procedure more than once at different brand-level detail, the lowest is used — it is the price a patient can actually obtain.
Which procedures are listed
The source publishes 616 item codes, most of them consumables and clinical line items nobody shops for. This site covers 77 of them, chosen for being things a patient plans treatment around, each given an English name written by hand rather than machine-translated.
Several are component fees rather than a whole treatment — an IVF cycle is billed as separate steps, and a premium lens price does not include the cataract surgery. Where that is true, the procedure page says so.
What this site is not
- It is not medical advice, and it does not assess or compare quality of care. A cheaper hospital is not a better or worse one; this data says nothing about outcomes.
- It does not rank or recommend institutions. Lists are sorted by price because that is the fact being reported, not as an endorsement.
- It is not an agency. It arranges nothing, refers no one, takes no commission, and has no commercial relationship with any hospital listed.
- It is not a live price feed. Disclosure happens on a cycle measured in months, and a hospital can change what it charges at any time. Always confirm before treatment.
Currency
Prices are published in Korean won. Dollar figures are an indicative conversion shown for scale only, fixed at build time rather than tracked live. Use the won figure for anything that matters.
Corrections
If a price here does not match what a hospital charges, the disclosure is likely out of date or the hospital has changed its rate. Either way the hospital is authoritative and this site is not. Contact details.