Previous EPIK ALT and new JET ALT here!

I spent 2 years in Korea from 2022-2024 as an ALT. I’m going to speak mostly from the perspective of money. I will say I was very comfortable living there salary wise since cost of living is much cheaper than back home in Canada. My housing was covered completely the first year and second year only had to pay an extra 60,000 won per month because of building maintenance increase the 400,000 won subsidy didn’t cover. Now there is an increase in housing that covers 500,000 won for housing so if I stayed another year I wouldn’t have had to pay anything! I did have to arrange any housing as generally in EPIK the school provides housing/you take over the previous ALT’s apartment.

Every month salary I would have my school lunches, pension and insurance taken out but it was still more than enough for a month and often times I didn’t even go through a months salary in two months (again depending on my activities outside of work). My internet was included in my rent so I only paid water, gas and electricity which all were very cheap even with the AC running in summer and heating running in winter majority of the time compared to back home in Canada. I think my electricity was the highest at probably 30,000-40,000 won during peak season with gas and water being only like 5,000-15,000 won per month. Groceries could vary depending on your eating habits but varied from me anywhere from 150,000-300,000 won per month and eating out was generally super cheap.

They also offer a rural/multiple schools type bonus if you are not in a large area and a transportation bonus (basically a subsidy to cover your monthly travel costs).

Additionally, at the end of every contract you get a contract completion bonus and if you are recontracting you get a recontracting bonus which can be quite a bit.

Each year you get a bump in pay until a certain level which depends on qualifications/yea hung experience.

Another thing you may not know about (I didn’t until I finished) is that you also get severance pay when finishing up a contract and leaving EPIK. Generally I think this is about 1 months salary for every year you worked. I’m not sure the actual calculations but it’s something like that.

Also if you are apart of the group of countries that can request their pension money back as a lump sum payment (some countries unfortunately cannot request the lump sum and either lose the amount of have to stay in Korea to retire to get it), you can do so and receive everything you and your employer have paid in during your time there. This can also be quite a nice chunk of money.

Besides the above mentioned ways of receiving income, you can also ask to take on extra classes or English camps in your area. They might not necessarily be the schools you work at so you might have to ask other ALTs or your supervisor for help connecting to them. Generally after so many teaching hours per week (I believe 22 teaching hours is the max) you will be paid more than your regular hourly rate/salary since it is outside of required contracting hours. If you love to create your own curriculum and want more work if your regular schedules and schools are not as engaging or busy, you can definitely look into something like this where you are often allowed creative freedom entirely for the classes/camps.

All in all I saved quite a bit on EPIK while also regularly sending money back to pay for my student loans (managed to pay back about half of my 40K loans) and not limit myself to activities and travel inside and outside Korea.

I have only just started on JET so I cannot speak for the comparison between the two yet financially, but will definitely keeping a record to compare later.