Everyone asks the same thing before they book flights: how much is this actually going to cost? The honest answer is it depends a lot on where you sleep and how you eat, but there’s a rough shape to it that holds true for most trips.
Below is a quick calculator with realistic default numbers, adjust anything that doesn’t match your travel style, and it’ll total everything up and convert it to your currency using live rates.
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Korea trip budget calculator
Defaults are realistic averages, edit anything to match your style.
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How the defaults were picked
Accommodation (₩80,000/night default) lands around the average for a standard hotel or motel room, assuming two people share a room, which is how most people actually travel. The calculator automatically works out how many rooms you’d need (one room per two people), so a group of 5 gets billed for 3 rooms, not 5. Hostel beds run cheaper (₩30,000-40,000), and a proper mid-range hotel room can run ₩120,000-150,000+.
Meals (₩12,000 default) averages out a cheap street food snack against a sit-down restaurant meal. Some meals will run you ₩6,000, others ₩20,000+, it evens out.
Snacks and coffee (₩6,000/day default) covers one coffee and something small, more if you’re a two-coffee-a-day person.
Transport (₩7,000/day default) assumes a handful of subway or bus rides on a T-money card. If you’re taking taxis regularly, bump this up.
This doesn’t include flights, shopping, or paid attractions, it’s a baseline for the everyday costs that catch people off guard.
Want the breakdown for every currency, not just one? The won converter covers ten of them with live rates. And once your budget’s sorted, here’s what to actually say when you’re spending it.
Prices in Korea come with their own sale signs, “1+1,” “정가/세일가,” percentage stickers that don’t always mean what you’d guess. I put together a sale price calculator that works out the final price in won and your currency, plus a quick guide to what those signs actually mean.
Where Korea budgets go wrong
Most people planning a first trip here get the shape of the budget wrong rather than the total. They over-allocate to some things and under-allocate to others, in a pattern specific enough to be worth naming.
Transport is cheaper than you expect
Subway and bus fares are low, and a taxi across central Seoul costs less than you’d pay in most comparable cities. People arrive braced for London or Tokyo prices and budget two or three times what they’ll spend.
What you do need is a T-money card, which also gives you a transfer discount between bus and subway that a single-ride ticket doesn’t.
Coffee is more expensive than you expect
A cafe latte in Seoul costs about what it costs in a European capital, and cafes are where Korean social life happens, so you’ll buy more of them than you planned. Two or three a day across a week is a real line item. The full breakdown is here.
Food splits into three tiers, not one
A convenience store meal, an ordinary neighbourhood restaurant, and a grilled meat dinner sit at very different price points. A single “food per day” figure hides that. Budget them separately and assume you’ll want at least a couple of the expensive kind.
Accommodation is priced per room
Korean hotels and guesthouses quote a room rate, not a per-person rate. Two people sharing pay roughly what one person pays. The calculator above works out room count from your party size for exactly this reason — it’s the single biggest distortion in a naive per-person estimate.
What the calculator doesn’t cover
Deliberately, because they vary too much to guess at for you. Add them yourself if they apply:
- Flights — the largest single number in most trips and entirely dependent on where you’re coming from.
- Intercity travel — a KTX from Seoul to Busan is a meaningful cost if you’re doing more than one city.
- Shopping — unpredictable by nature. If you’re planning a cosmetics or clothing haul, treat it as its own envelope rather than letting it leak into the daily figure.
- Data — a SIM or eSIM is a one-off at the start.
- Luggage storage — small, but it catches people on arrival and departure days. Lockers and prices here.
Two habits that lower the total
Eat lunch where office workers eat. Korean restaurants often run a lunch set that’s substantially cheaper than the same food at dinner, and the areas around office buildings are full of them between noon and one. It’s the best value meal of the day, by some distance.
Let the side dishes do work. A Korean main comes with banchan that are refilled free. Two people ordering two mains and sharing is normal and filling; ordering three because the portions look small is how people overspend on their first day.
Money you get back
If you shop, some of the tax is refundable at the airport, and the threshold is lower than most English guides say. That’s worth reading before you shop rather than after — the actual procedure is here.
An unused T-money balance is refundable too, minus a small fee, at any convenience store.
A note on the numbers
This is a planning tool, not a quote. Prices in Korea move, Seoul is dearer than everywhere else in the country, and the same nominal budget goes noticeably further in Busan or Daegu. Treat the output as a starting figure to argue with, and check the exchange rate on the day with the won converter.
Read next
- Korean won converter — the live rate, and how far the rate you get sits from it.
- ATMs that take foreign cards — where the cash comes from.
- Sale price calculator — for the shopping line you didn’t budget for.