E-7 Occupation List: How to Check If Your Job Code Qualifies

Your job title is not the point.

You found a Korean employer. The contract looks solid. Then an immigration officer asks for your occupation code, and everything stops. That is where most E-7 applications actually begin. It is also where a lot of them quietly die.

Korea does not approve work visas by job title. It approves them by code. A “Growth Marketing Lead” and a “Marketing Specialist” can land on opposite sides of the line, even at the same company, for the same salary. The sajeung (visa) follows the code.

So before you gather a single document, you need to know which code your role maps to, and whether that code sits on the current list. That list changes. Here is how it is built. D-10 to E-7 status change

Does my job qualify for E-7 visa, or does it just look like it does?

Your duties decide it, not your title. The Ministry of Justice maps your actual work to an occupation code from the Korean Standard Classification of Occupations. If that code appears on the current E-7 list, you can apply. If it does not, no degree and no salary offer will rescue the case. Officers read the job description in your contract, then match it themselves.

This is the single most misunderstood part of the process. Applicants read a headline like “IT jobs qualify for E-7” and assume their offer is safe. Then the officer reads the actual duty list in the employment contract and sees general office support, customer service, or translation work bundled in. Those duties pull the role toward codes that are not eligible.

Here is the catch. Your employer writes that job description. Most Korean HR teams write it in a hurry, in Korean, using internal team names that mean nothing to immigration. “사업개발팀 매니저” is not a code. It is a seat on an org chart.

Ask your employer one question before you sign: which occupation code are they filing you under? A company that has sponsored E-7 workers before will answer in seconds. A company that hesitates has never done this, and you are about to become their training exercise.

That one answer tells you which of the four E-7 tracks you are in.

What are the E-7 visa approved occupation categories?

E-7 splits into four sub-types. E-7-1 covers professional roles and holds about 67 occupations, the largest group. E-7-2 covers semi-skilled service roles. E-7-3 covers general skilled trades. E-7-4 is a separate points-based track for skilled workers already in Korea. The Ministry of Justice republishes the full list in its annual visa guideline, and the counts shift year to year.

The E-7 specialty occupation examples people search for almost always sit in E-7-1. Software developer. Mechanical engineer. Designer. Overseas sales specialist. Cook of a specific foreign cuisine. Translator and interpreter. University-level researcher. Ship design engineer.

Notice what is missing. General administrative assistant. Retail sales clerk. Domestic worker. Driver. Those are not oversights. They are deliberate exclusions, because the E-7 track exists to bring in skills the domestic labor market cannot fill. The Korea Immigration Service frames the whole category that way.

E-7-4 deserves its own warning. It is not a job list at all. It is a scoring system for people who already worked in Korea on E-9, E-10 or H-2 status, and it runs against an annual quota. When the quota fills, applications wait for the next cycle no matter how strong the score is. E-7-4 skilled worker visa eligibility points quota

So how do you turn a job offer into an actual five-digit number?

How to find E-7 job code Korea assigns to your role

Start at the source. Occupation codes come from the Korean Standard Classification of Occupations, or hanguk pyojun jigeop bunryu, maintained by Statistics Korea. Match your daily duties to a code there. Then check that code against the Ministry of Justice visa guideline for the current year. Two matches, in that order. Skipping the first step is why applicants guess wrong.

Work through it like this.

1. Write out your real duties. Not the title. Five to seven concrete tasks, in plain language. “Build and maintain backend APIs” beats “support digital transformation.”
2. Find the matching KSCO code. Statistics Korea publishes the classification with descriptions for each code. Your role gets one primary code, not three.
3. Check that code against the E-7 guideline. The current-year guideline is distributed through immigration offices and posted on HiKorea. Each listed occupation carries its own extra conditions.
4. Read the conditions attached to your code. Some occupations require a specific degree field. Some require years of experience. Some cap how many foreign workers one company may hold.
5. Confirm with the immigration office that will process you. Call the office covering your employer’s address. Officers apply the guideline, so ask them, not a forum.

Step four is where people lose weeks. An occupation being listed does not mean you personally qualify for it. The general standard is a bachelor’s degree in a related field, or an associate degree plus one year of related experience, or five or more years of related experience with no degree. Related is the operative word. A philosophy degree does not open a mechanical engineering code.

And there is a money threshold sitting underneath all of it.

The step where most E-7 applications get rejected

Salary. For most E-7-1 roles, the offered wage must reach at least 80% of Korea’s per-capita gross national income from the previous year. Immigration treats a below-threshold salary as evidence that the role is not genuinely professional. The company’s size, tax filings and existing foreign-to-Korean staff ratio get checked too. A qualifying code with a weak employer still fails.

That last sentence surprises people. You are not the only one being assessed. Your employer is.

Immigration looks at whether the company actually needs a foreign professional, whether it pays its taxes, and whether it already employs enough Korean nationals to justify another foreign hire. A three-person startup offering a marketing specialist role at minimum wage will not clear this, no matter how clean your degree is. Verify your employer’s standing through Government24 and its tax status through the National Tax Service before you commit.

The legal backbone here is short and blunt. The Immigration Act, published in English translation by MOLEG, sets the rule this way:

A foreigner who intends to be employed in the Republic of Korea shall obtain the status of sojourn under which he or she is eligible for employment activities.

Status first, work second. Working outside the scope of your status is treated as a violation, not a paperwork slip. That is also why switching to a job with a different occupation code is not a private matter between you and your new boss.

Once approved, the code stays attached to you. It appears in your record and it constrains your next move. E-7 employer change workplace notification

What if your job is not on the E-7 eligible profession list Korea publishes?

You have three realistic options. Reshape the role with your employer so the duties genuinely match a listed code. Move to a different visa track that fits the work. Or build the qualification you are missing and apply later. What does not work is filing anyway and hoping an officer stretches the guideline. Officers do not have that discretion on the occupation list itself.

Reshaping is the most common fix, and it has to be honest. If your offer is 70% listed-code work and 30% general admin, ask the employer to remove the admin duties and put the real technical scope in the contract. That is a genuine change to the job. Writing a fictional job description is document fraud, and it puts your employer’s future sponsorships at risk alongside your own status.

Switching tracks is worth checking early. D-10 gives you time in Korea to job hunt while you look for a properly coded offer. F-2 through the points system removes employer sponsorship from the equation entirely, which is why so many long-term residents aim for it. E-7-4 exists for people whose Korean work history is in production or agriculture rather than an office.

Building the qualification is slower and it works. Two more years of documented experience in the right field can move you from ineligible to eligible without changing anything else. Keep your employment certificates, tax records and job descriptions from every year abroad. Immigration wants proof, and proof means paper from your former employers, not a resume.

One more thing people forget. Your oegugin deungnokjeung (ARC) records the status you were granted, and renewals are assessed against the same occupation conditions you first met. Drifting into different work over three years is a renewal problem waiting to happen. E-7 to F-2 conversion points income

Your next move

Ask your employer for the occupation code today, in writing. If they cannot name one, that is your answer about how prepared they are.

Then call the immigration office that covers your employer’s address and read them your actual duties. Five minutes on the phone beats five weeks of guessing. Book it through HiKorea rather than walking in.

And keep the current-year guideline handy. The list is revised, occupations get added, conditions get tightened. What was true for someone’s blog post two years ago may not be true for your file this month.