South Korea’s elderly population aged 70 and older surpassed those in their 20s for the first time last year, a demographic shift driven by record-low birth rates and a rapidly aging population.
The number of people aged 70 and older stood at 6.31 million in 2023, outnumbering the 6.19 million people in their 20s, according to the Ministry of Interior and Safety on Jan. 10.
In a notable reversal of demographic trends, Korea’s elderly population aged 70 and older increased by 237,614 (3.9 percent) compared to the previous year, while the number of people in their 20s decreased by 219,695 (3.4 percent) during the same period. A decade earlier, in 2014, the 70 and older age group stood at 4.44 million, significantly lower than the 6.64 million people in their 20s.
“The long-standing perception in Korean society of having more young people in their 20s than in their 70s has now been overturned,” said Cho Young-tae, a professor at Seoul National University’s Graduate School of Public Health. He anticipates that this gap will widen in the future.
Korea’s population continued its downward trend for the fourth consecutive year after first declining in 2020. The total number of registered residents in South Korea was 51.352 million last year, down 0.2 percent from 2022. “The decline in births significantly outweighs the decrease in deaths,” said a Ministry of Interior and Safety official.
The country’s total fertility rate, which estimates the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime, plummeted to a record low of 0.7 in 2022.
