South Korea is moving quickly to remove the financial penalties that lead couples to delay registering their marriages, but partners who live together without registering still face legal gaps surrounding inheritance rights that no reform now on the table would close.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) review of South Korea’s fertility crisis, published on Nov. 4, describes the country’s 2025 fertility rate of 0.8 as the lowest recorded anywhere and stresses how closely parenthood remains tied to marriage.

Only 5.8%of births in 2024 took place outside marriage, according to the Ministry of Data and Statistics