A Korean address is not a code you have to memorise. It is a set of directions, and the last number is a measurement.
Once you know that, the string on your booking confirmation stops being noise. You can tell how big the road is before you turn onto it, which side of it your door is on, and roughly how far down you need to walk.
Taking one apart
Here is a real address, the one the district office of Geumcheon uses in its own explanation of the system.
Read it in order and it narrows: city, district, road, building. Then the name in brackets is the neighbourhood, which is part of the format rather than a leftover.
The number is the useful part
Most people treat a house number as an arbitrary label. Korea’s is not.
When the roads were numbered, the rule was mechanical. Start at one end, walk along, and every 20 metres the number goes up by two: odd on the left, even on the right. So the number carries a distance in it. Multiply by ten and you have roughly how many metres you are from the beginning of the road.
Building 70 is about 700 metres along, on the right. Building 9 is near the start, on the left. If you come out of the subway at number 230 looking for number 20, you already know to turn around, and you know it is a walk rather than a couple of doors.
The direction the numbers run is fixed too. Roads were laid out west to east and south to north, so the start of the road is its western or southern end.
The word on the end of the road name
Three endings, and they sort roads by size.
daero is eight lanes or more. ro is two to seven. gil is anything smaller, which in practice covers most of the streets where the good restaurants are.
The useful trick is in a road name like Sihung-daero 73-gil. A gil named after a larger road is a branch off it, and the number says where the branch happens. That street leaves Sihung-daero around building 73. If you can find the big road, you can find the small one without a map, which matters when your phone is dead and the alley you want is one of fifteen.
Why your booking and your map disagree
Korea changed address systems and did not finish deleting the old one.
Road-name addresses became the legal standard on 1 January 2014, after a run of years where both were used side by side. The older system numbered land parcels rather than roads, and it is still in use where the parcel is the point: property documents, land registration, plenty of older paperwork.
What that means for you is that a guesthouse listing, a restaurant’s own website and a government page can each hand you a different-looking address for the same door. Neither is wrong. Naver Map and Kakao Map take either one, which makes the map app the tiebreaker rather than a fourth opinion.
Postcodes changed too. Since 1 August 2015 they are five digits instead of six, tied to the road-name system. A six-digit postcode on a page is a reliable sign that nobody has touched it in a decade.
What to actually hand a driver
The Korean text, not the romanisation.
An address written in the Latin alphabet is a transliteration. It has not been translated into anything; it has been respelled into letters that a Korean driver then has to convert back. Some manage it instantly and some do not, and either way you have added a step.
Keep the address in Hangul on your screen, or pin the place in a map app and show the pin. The Naver Map guide covers getting a place onto a screen you can hand over, and the taxi guide covers what happens after you do.
One more thing that sounds small and is not. In conversation, people mostly do not use road names. They use the neighbourhood, the one in brackets at the end, plus a landmark: the exit number, the big crossing, the chain café on the corner. The official address is what goes on the parcel. The bracket is what someone says when they are telling you where to meet.
The road classification by lane count, the odd-left and even-right rule, the order of the address and the worked example are from Geumcheon district office’s published explanation of the road-name address system, read on 14 September 2026, which is also where the rule that a building number times ten gives the approximate distance in metres comes from. The branch naming convention, where a side street carries the parent road’s name and the number of the point it leaves from, is set out in the enforcement rules under the Road Name Address Act. Road-name addresses took legal effect on 1 January 2014; the five-digit postcode replaced the six-digit one on 1 August 2015.
