Korea has two address systems, which can be confusing for newcomers: the road-name address and the older lot-number (jibun) address.
Road-name address
Structure: Province + City/District + Road name + Building number. Example: Teheran-ro 152. This has been the official system since 2014 and is best for navigation and delivery.
Lot-number address
Structure: Province + City + Neighborhood (dong) + Lot number. Example: Yeoksam-dong 736-1. It is based on land parcels and is still used in real-estate contexts.
Which to use for shipping?
For international shipping and online shopping, use the road-name address converted to English. Its structure (street name + number) matches international address formats. The converter shows both road-name and lot-number English forms so you can pick what a site requires.
Building number logic
Building numbers are assigned along the road at roughly 20m intervals, with odd numbers on one side and even on the other. So similar numbers are physically close.
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Worked example: one address through the converter
Here is what happens when the Korean address "서울특별시 강남구 테헤란로 152,
101동 1502호" goes through the converter on this site, field by field —
and why each value comes out the way it does.
- Address Line 1 → 152 Teheran-ro. The building number moves in
front of the road name, because Western sorting machines read number-first. The
road name itself is pulled from the government database, not re-romanized.
- Address Line 2 → Apt 101-1502. Dong and ho collapse into one
hyphenated unit. This part is user input — it does not exist in the public data.
- City → Gangnam-gu, State → Seoul. The counter-intuitive one:
the district goes in City, the metropolis in State, since State is the larger unit.
- ZIP → 06236. The current 5-digit code, matched from the same
database — never the retired 6-digit format.
The point of walking through it: none of these values are translations. They are
re-orderings of official records, which is why the output matches what Korean customs
and couriers can machine-read.
Why the order reverses
Korean addresses run big-to-small — city, district, road, building —
because that is how Korean sorting works. Western forms expect the
opposite, so an English Korean address is simply the same data read
backwards, with "South Korea" appended. Nothing is translated; every part
is romanized and re-ordered.
The romanization is official, not ad hoc
Street and place names follow Revised Romanization, the system the
Korean government has used since 2000. That is why the converter's output
matches road signs and the national address database letter for letter —
and why inventing your own spelling ("Tehran Road") breaks the match.
Reading the pieces
- -si / -gun / -gu — city / county / district. These
are the "City" of a Western form.
- -do — province (Gyeonggi-do). Together with the
metropolitan cities, this is your "State/Province".
- -ro / -gil / -daero — road classes. Building
numbers go in front: 152 Teheran-ro.
- Dong-ho — building and unit inside a complex,
written 101-1502 in the unit line.
Korea switched to this road-name system nationally in 2014, replacing
lot-number addresses for mail. Old-style addresses still exist for land
records, but for shipping, the road-name form plus the 5-digit postal code
is the one that machines — and couriers — recognize.