Busan’s Young-Adult Migration Turns Sharply at 25–29

Busan recorded a net gain of 927 people aged 20 to 24 in 2025 and a net loss of 5,437 among those aged 25 to 29. The divide runs through universities, wages, housing and a labour market that already reaches into Ulsan and South Gyeongsang, while city and national policy are moving toward a larger southeastern economy built to keep more opportunity within the region.

Busan lost fewer people to domestic migration in 2025 than it had a year earlier, yet the improvement was uneven enough to expose a much sharper problem inside the young-adult population. Net migration was positive by 927 among people aged 20 to 24 and negative by 5,437 among those aged 25 to 29, the largest loss of any five-year age group. The outflow narrowed again to 2,236 among 30- to 34-year-olds and 482 among people aged 35 to 39. Busan’s total domestic net loss fell from 13,657 in 2024 to 12,181 in 2025, while losses among people in their thirties also eased substantially; among 25- to 29-year-olds, the balance moved the other way, slipping from minus 5,370 to minus 5,437. Improvement at the citywide level had not reached the age group responsible for the largest share of Busan’s young-adult loss.

Treating everyone in their twenties as a single population hides how abrupt the change is. Busan lost a net 7,228 people aged 20 to 39 in 2025, with the 25–29 group accounting for roughly three quarters of that balance, while its net migration rate of minus 2.8 percent stood against a positive 0.6 percent among people aged 20 to 24. Combined into one decade-wide number, the twenties produce a net loss of 4,510; separated into five-year groups, they show a city gaining people at one stage of early adulthood and losing far more immediately afterward. The difference shifts the population story away from a general decline among “young people” and toward the years when education gives way to work, career progression and more consequential decisions about where to live.

The reasons people gave for moving bring another dimension to the same age pattern. Education produced a net gain of 3,479 people for Busan in 2025, while employment produced a net loss of 9,063; family and housing also pushed the balance outward. Those categories describe different movers rather than one cohort followed from university to work, and the decision to relocate can combine employment, housing and family considerations at the same time. Still, Busan was gaining people through education while losing far more through employment in the same year that its largest age-specific deficit appeared in the late twenties. The migration tables cannot tell us that a student who arrived at 20 later left for a job at 27, but they place the strongest educational inflow and the largest employment-related loss on opposite sides of a stage when work begins to shape a much larger share of adult life.

The latest detailed quarterly figures reinforce rather than blur that division. In the second quarter of 2026, Busan recorded a net inflow of 287 people aged 20 to 24 and a net outflow of 896 among those aged 25 to 29; the city as a whole lost 2,596 people, 1,108 fewer than in the same quarter a year earlier. A single quarter cannot establish a new annual trend, but the direction between the two halves of the twenties remained the same as in 2025. Overall outflow was smaller, while the largest five-year age loss in the quarter again appeared among people aged 25 to 29.

Universities Reach Farther Than Before

Pusan National University has begun drawing a larger share of its regular-admission students from well beyond the southeast, giving Busan one concrete example of how a regional institution can widen the city’s entry point for young adults. The share of final registrants from Seoul, Gyeonggi and Incheon rose from 6.5 percent in 2024 to 9.2 percent in 2025 and 13.9 percent in 2026, while the share from Busan, Ulsan and South Gyeongsang fell from 75.1 percent to 68.2 percent over the latest year. The university followed that shift by holding its first stand-alone admissions event in Seoul, where about 200 prospective students, parents and teachers heard about programs connected with companies and strategic industries in southeastern Korea.

Pusan National University has associated the broader recruitment geography partly with stronger support for regional flagship universities and national balanced-development policy, although admissions figures alone cannot establish why individual students chose Busan. One university and one admissions route do not describe higher education across the city, but the change shows that Busan’s pull on students is not confined to those who already live nearby.

Admission is only one stage in a much longer urban relationship. Four or five years in Busan can produce friendships, professional contacts and familiarity with the city, yet graduation opens a different map of employers, salaries and occupations, and the second job may widen that map further still. Pusan National University’s 13.9 percent figure records where students came from when they enrolled; it cannot tell us whether they will take their first job in Busan, commute into another part of the southeast, move to the capital region or remain long enough for later decisions about housing and family to matter. The institution that succeeds in bringing a student into the city does not control most of the conditions that shape where that person will build a career several years later.

University policy takes on a different meaning once it becomes part of population strategy rather than education policy alone. A stronger regional university can recruit from farther away and connect more students with local companies, but those connections become less decisive if a graduate later finds only a narrow group of employers offering higher pay, greater responsibility or a different specialization. The migration data do not identify the individual transition that produces the 25–29 loss, yet they locate the age range in which attraction at the university gate no longer resembles the city’s population balance a few years later. By then, the range and quality of the surrounding labour market have become at least as important as the institution through which a student first arrived.

A city with strong universities but too few later career paths can become an attractive place to study without becoming the place where those students spend the next decade of their lives. Busan’s admissions data show that the first part is possible. Its wage distribution begins to show why the second is harder.

The Wage Gap Opens Higher Up

Busan’s labour-market problem is larger than whether young adults can find any job. A Busan Development Institute analysis of 2023 Regional Employment Survey microdata found that full-time workers aged 18 to 39 employed in Busan earned an average of 2.95 million won a month, compared with 3.34 million won in the capital region. Nearly half of Busan’s young full-time workers earned between 2 million and 3 million won a month, while 13.6 percent earned at least 4 million won. In the capital region, 25.4 percent were above that threshold, and monthly pay at the 90th percentile was about 5 million won compared with roughly 4 million won in Busan.

The differences are larger in several sectors that matter to highly educated workers. Average monthly pay was 890,000 won lower than the capital region in finance and insurance, 820,000 won lower in professional, scientific and technical services and 660,000 won lower in information and communications. Firm size, occupation, education and experience all contribute to those gaps, so geography alone cannot explain them. An engineer, researcher, software worker or financial professional nevertheless chooses among the employers that exist within reach and the positions those employers can offer, which makes the structure of the local market increasingly important as a career becomes more specialised.

Average wage growth over time complicates any simple story of stagnant Busan pay. From 2015 to 2023, average wages for young full-time workers grew at roughly 3.3 percent a year in Busan, nationwide and in the capital region. Growth was weaker in Busan higher in the wage distribution, including at the 80th and 90th percentiles. The pressure is therefore concentrated less in whether wages rise at all than in the number and growth of better-paid positions available further up the career ladder.

A first job asks less of a labour market than a second or third. One suitable employer may be enough for a graduate entering an occupation; several years later, the same worker may need another company in the field, a higher-paying role, greater responsibility or a different specialization. Employment rates cannot show whether those next moves are available. Busan’s largest young-adult migration loss occurs at the age when finding work increasingly becomes a question of how far a career can progress without leaving the region.

Seoul Still Pulls in the Twenties

Seoul continues to draw young adults during the decade in which Busan’s migration balance deteriorates most sharply. In 2025, Seoul recorded a net migration rate of plus 2.8 percent among people in their twenties, the highest among Korea’s provinces and metropolitan cities, while people in their thirties recorded a net rate of minus 1.3 percent. The Seoul figures use ten-year age groups rather than Busan’s five-year breakdown and cannot reveal whether an equivalent turning point exists at 25–29, but they show that the capital retains a powerful attraction during the years when education gives way to work and early career formation. That pull survives alongside housing pressures significant enough for the city government to spend heavily trying to soften them.

The economic system producing that pull extends well beyond Seoul itself. Seoul’s population fell from about 9.91 million in 2015 to roughly 9.25 million in 2025, yet the capital region as a whole grew to about 25.9 million people, or 50.9 percent of the national population, as Gyeonggi and Incheon absorbed more residents around the same metropolitan economy. A worker can leave a Seoul address for Goyang, Hanam, Suwon or Incheon without giving up access to many of the firms, universities and professional networks that made the capital attractive in the first place, particularly where transport keeps those opportunities within practical reach. Municipal population loss can therefore coexist with metropolitan concentration: residence spreads outward while much of the economic network remains inside the same broad region.

Housing sits inside that arrangement rather than outside it. The 2024 Housing Survey found that 53.4 percent of Seoul households were renters and 44.1 percent owner-occupiers, compared with 36.1 percent renters and 60.8 percent owner-occupiers in Busan; because those figures cover all households, they cannot establish how affordable either city is for a particular young worker, but they reveal markedly different tenure structures. Seoul also offered up to 200,000 won a month in rent support to 15,000 young residents in 2025, after roughly 114,000 people had received support through 2024. Economic attraction and housing pressure are not cancelling each other out: the same metropolitan system can keep pulling young adults while making residence expensive enough to require sustained public intervention.

A housing advantage would therefore be of limited value to Busan if the worker choosing that home still had to leave the region for the next specialised position or promotion. Housing becomes a more powerful competitive asset when it sits inside a labour market broad enough to support several stages of a career, allowing people to change employers without rebuilding their professional and social lives somewhere else. The capital region achieves part of that flexibility by separating residence from opportunity across municipal borders. For Busan, the relevant comparison is not housing cost alone, but whether the wider southeast can offer enough career depth that work and residence no longer have to be solved inside a single city boundary.

Work Already Crosses City Lines

Busan’s labour market already extends beyond the line that defines its population count. A Busan Development Institute analysis found that 10.1 percent of young Busan residents in its sample worked outside the city, earning an average of 3.61 million won a month compared with 2.93 million won among residents whose workplaces were inside Busan. Occupation, industry, education and experience differ between the groups, so the pay difference cannot be attributed simply to crossing a municipal line. What it does reveal is how incomplete a city-only view of employment has become: for a young Busan resident, a job in Yangsan, Gimhae or Ulsan may belong to the same practical career geography even though it falls outside statistics limited to workplaces inside the municipality.

Daily commuting gives that geography a much larger scale. A 2025 survey counted 3.78 million commuters across Busan, Ulsan and South Gyeongsang, with 98.7 percent working somewhere within the three-region southeast, while about 117,000 people travelled from South Gyeongsang into Busan for work — the largest cross-provincial commuting flow in the region. These are not marginal movements at the edges of three separate economies. Around places such as Gimhae, Yangsan and Changwon, administrative boundaries cut through established relationships among housing, employment and transport, leaving the worker’s realistic choices dependent less on the jurisdiction printed on an address than on travel time and the range of employers within reach.

Residential migration makes the same geography look different because a change of address is recorded even when the employment relationship survives. In 2025, 43,163 people moved from Busan to South Gyeongsang and 40,742 moved in the opposite direction, leaving Busan with a net loss of 2,421 but more than 80,000 moves across the boundary in total. A worker who moves from Busan to Gimhae for a larger home may continue working in Busan; another can remain a Busan resident while taking a position in Yangsan or Ulsan. The net migration figure records the residential outcome while compressing the much larger circulation underneath it, allowing Busan to lose residents to South Gyeongsang without losing the same number of workers, consumers or professional ties from the southeastern economy.

The capital region shows how powerful that separation between residence and opportunity can become once enough jobs, housing markets and transport networks operate across administrative borders. Busan, Ulsan and South Gyeongsang already share some of the same functional geography, but the earlier wage evidence points to a crucial difference: spreading existing opportunities across a larger map is not equivalent to having enough specialised employers and higher-paying positions to support repeated career moves. Faster access to Ulsan or Changwon can enlarge the set of realistic jobs for a Busan resident, but its value ultimately depends on what those labour markets contain. Connectivity increases opportunity only when there is enough opportunity to connect.

Growth Came From Inside Busan

The separation between residence and wider economic life also appears within Busan itself. Gangseo-gu gained a net 7,105 people through migration in 2025 and Busanjin-gu gained 7,128, making them conspicuous exceptions in a city that lost 12,181 people overall through domestic migration. Housing was the largest positive recorded reason in both places, contributing 5,618 to Gangseo’s balance and 4,773 to Busanjin’s, which can make the two districts look like evidence that residential development is reversing population decline locally. Where those residents came from changes that interpretation.

A Breeze in Busan calculation using KOSIS Domestic Migration Statistics found that 6,247 of Gangseo-gu’s net gain came from exchanges with other Busan districts, while the equivalent internal balance accounted for 6,994 of Busanjin-gu’s 7,128 gain. Roughly 88 percent of Gangseo’s increase and 98 percent of Busanjin’s therefore came from redistribution within Busan rather than from adding residents to the city from elsewhere in Korea. The districts were growing, but most of that growth represented Busan households choosing a different part of Busan — a distinction that disappears when district-level gains are treated as evidence of citywide attraction.

Internal movement can still reorganise urban life on a large scale. A household leaving Sasang for Gangseo may gain more space or shorten a journey to work while shifting demand for schools, retail, transit and public services toward the western edge; a move into Busanjin can place the same household inside a denser central network of rail, buses, employment and established amenities. Neither household adds to Busan’s overall population, yet both reveal where existing residents believe the combination of housing, access and daily life works better for them. District migration can therefore reveal settlement preferences even when it says much less about whether Busan is attracting people from outside the city.

Gangseo and Busanjin also represent quite different forms of that choice. Gangseo sits beside industrial, logistics and airport-linked employment areas and close to housing and job markets across the South Gyeongsang boundary, while Busanjin offers a central position inside Busan’s established transit and service network. Housing led the recorded migration balance in both districts, but the statistics do not identify whether households were responding primarily to price, dwelling size, new supply, commute times or proximity to family and services. Similar headline gains can emerge from very different urban conditions.

For population policy, internal redistribution and external attraction answer different questions. Better neighbourhoods, easier commutes and new housing can improve residents’ lives and reduce pressure to leave particular parts of Busan without immediately changing the city’s national migration balance; a worker can even move into Gimhae while remaining economically tied to Busan. District growth, municipal population and regional retention can therefore move in different directions at the same time. Reading one of those measures as if it represented all three would obscure whether the change came from a new resident, a different address or a continuing economic relationship across the city boundary.

Busan Is Planning Beyond the City Line

Busan’s 2026–2030 population plan marks a substantial change in the problem the city government says it is trying to solve. The plan contains 107 projects and 3.3416 trillion won in spending over five years, yet only part of that money is organised as explicitly youth-focused support: 12 projects under “youth growth and independence” account for 229.06 billion won, while 520.28 billion won goes to settlement and living-environment measures and 2.0446 trillion won — about 61 percent of the total — sits under the strategy for building a superregional innovation-growth base. The plan formally shifts its focus from managing population size toward urban growth and competitiveness, from resident population alone toward a broader living population, and from a single-city geography toward a wider southeastern regional frame. Youth outflow is being placed inside a larger question about the economy and the geography in which people build their lives.

The shift is notable because the policy boundary now resembles the geography already visible in the data. Workers are moving every day among Busan, Gimhae, Yangsan, Changwon and Ulsan, households can cross into South Gyeongsang without severing their economic connection to Busan, and the two Busan districts with the strongest migration gains in 2025 grew mainly by redistributing residents who were already inside the city. A population strategy centred only on registered residents within Busan would struggle to distinguish those different movements. The new plan instead describes a broader living population, cross-boundary cooperation and a regional circulation of talent, while explicitly linking industry, jobs and settlement as part of its superregional strategy.

National policy is building institutions around the same larger geography. In May 2026, amendments to the balanced-development law passed the National Assembly with provisions for a balanced-growth impact assessment, a special account for superregional cooperation and stronger mechanisms for projects crossing administrative borders, all tied to the government’s 5-pole, 3-special-region strategy. Much of that framework is still moving from legislation into implementation, so it cannot explain migration patterns that were already visible in 2025. Its significance for Busan lies in the capacity it is intended to create: regional transport, strategic industries and cross-border projects are being given legal and financial channels that reach beyond agreements among individual local governments.

Higher education is being placed inside that economic geography as well. The Education Ministry’s 2026 plan calls for more than 4 trillion won in additional investment over five years in regional flagship national universities, ties those institutions to the strategic industries of the 5-pole, 3-special-region framework and expands RISE cooperation across economic and living zones that cross conventional administrative boundaries. The government’s stated purpose is to raise the quality of regional education and research while reducing the outflow of talented people to the capital region. Pusan National University’s growing capital-region enrollment gives Busan an early example of stronger attraction at the university gate, but the migration loss at ages 25–29 lies several years further along, after graduates have encountered the actual supply of employers, salaries and career moves available to them.

Those policies reach across several conditions that appear separately in Busan’s data: attraction through universities, the depth of later career choices, housing and a labour market that already crosses city boundaries. Universities are expected to attract and train people; strategic industries to expand employment; transport and regional cooperation to bring more of those opportunities within reach; housing and settlement policy to shape the conditions under which people remain in the region. The heaviest young-adult migration loss appears after several of those systems have begun to interact. Most of the current policy framework belongs to 2026 and later, however, while the 2025 migration figures establish the conditions it is being asked to change rather than evidence of its effect.

The scale and breadth of the strategy also make a single definition of success increasingly difficult. A university can recruit more students from Seoul without increasing long-term residence in Busan; regional commuting can expand while the city continues to lose registered residents; a household can move to Gimhae while one or more members keep working in Busan. Each of those outcomes describes a different form of attachment to the city and the southeast. Once policy itself has moved beyond the municipal boundary, population totals alone can no longer show whether the broader strategy is producing the outcomes it was designed to pursue.

When Does a Graduate Count as Staying?

Busan’s RISE program brings that problem into a formal performance target. In its first year, the city selected 20 universities and 122 projects with 134.1 billion won in funding, while its five-year framework included a goal of improving the regional-settlement employment rate by 15 percent. The wording matters because higher-education policy is being asked to produce an outcome beyond admission and graduation: where graduates work, and whether that employment remains connected to the region.

The target becomes more complicated once residence and employment cross different boundaries. A graduate living in Busan and working in Ulsan, another living in Gimhae and working in Busan, and a third both living and working in Busan occupy different positions in municipal population statistics while remaining connected to the same southeastern economy. Timing changes the meaning again. Employment six months after graduation can show that a university helped someone enter the regional labour market, but it says much less about whether the same market can support a second job, a promotion or a more specialised position several years later, the stage at which Busan’s wage distribution and migration data become more troubling. The public RISE headline provides the 15 percent improvement target but does not on its own specify the denominator, measurement horizon or treatment of every cross-boundary residence-work combination.

Busan is not starting without longitudinal information. Its youth panel follows roughly 3,000 participants across employment and entrepreneurship, economic activity, housing, culture and policy experience, allowing the city to observe changes in the lives of the same young adults over time rather than relying only on annual snapshots. University records, RISE performance measures, employment programs, housing programs and resident-registration migration statistics collect other parts of the picture. The difficulty is that each system was built to answer a different administrative question, while the late-twenties migration problem unfolds across several of them.

Those differences matter because an outcome can look successful from one administrative perspective and incomplete from another. A graduate who moves to Gimhae for housing but continues working for a Busan company lowers Busan’s resident count without necessarily weakening the regional labour market; another may remain registered in Busan yet face so few employers in a specialised field that the next career move eventually takes place elsewhere. A university can raise first-job placement and meet an early employment objective even if some of those workers leave several years later when the available positions narrow. Residence, employment and career progression describe different parts of retention, and the policy ambition now reaches far enough that reading any one of them alone would miss part of the result.

Busan’s population plan acknowledges some of that complexity in its own design. It calls for a stronger evaluation-and-feedback system and describes a “performance-accountability” approach while simultaneously expanding policy from resident population to living population and from city-scale action toward a wider southeastern region. That creates a more demanding standard than asking whether the city’s population total rose in a particular year. A regional strategy has to reveal whether people can move among universities, employers and homes while the southeast remains a viable place to build a career; Busan still has to understand when that regional integration is occurring alongside continued loss of residents from the municipality itself.

The current policies are too new for the 2025 migration figures to serve as a verdict on them. Those figures instead provide a demanding baseline for the strategy now being built across universities, industries, transport, housing and regional cooperation. In 2025, Busan recorded a net gain of 927 people aged 20 to 24 and a net loss of 5,437 among those aged 25 to 29. The balance was still positive before 25 and deeply negative immediately after.