Korean New Year Money (Sebaetdon) Calculator

What is sebaetdon?

Sebaetdon (세뱃돈), or New Year money, is the money that adults in Korea give to children on Seollal, the holiday that marks the first day of the Korean new year. The calculator works out New Year money for your own children, your nieces and nephews, relatives’ children, and the children of friends and acquaintances. It also works out the money that adults give to their own parents and elders on Seollal.

How to use the calculator

Each row is one group of people you are giving to.

1. Choose the Relationship: My child, Niece/nephew, Relative’s child, Child of a friend or acquaintance, or Parent / elder.
2. Choose the School level: Preschool, Elementary school (grades 1–3), Elementary school (grades 4–6), Middle school, High school, College student, or Job seeker / early-career adult. For Parent / elder there is no school level to choose.
3. Enter the Number of people.
4. Amount they gave your child is optional. Fill it in if the other person has already given money to your child.
5. Press Add a recipient for each additional group.
6. Total budget is optional too. If you set one, the calculator lowers amounts to bring the total down to it, but never below the minimum of the reference range.

You get three things back.

• Recommended per person: one amount for every row. Open “Why this amount, and the reference amount” to see how the calculator got there.
• Reference amount: what surveys actually found for that school level and relationship. It won’t always match the recommended amount.
• Total and Suggested new bills: how many 50,000-won and 10,000-won bills to get so that every envelope can be filled separately.

How the calculator picks an amount

The recommended amount comes from five rules, applied in order. Only one part of them rests on survey data: the reference range for each school level. Everything else is a rule the calculator sets itself.

The commonly used amounts are 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 50,000, 70,000, 100,000, 150,000, 200,000, 300,000 and 500,000 won. Rules 3 and 5 only ever change an amount to one of these.

Recommended amounts by school level and relationship

This is what the calculator recommends per person when you leave both “Amount they gave your child” and the total budget empty.

For parents and elders, the recommended amount is 300,000 won per person. You can find the reference range for each school level in the table under “What the surveys found” below.

Here is how each default amount was chosen from within its reference range.

• Elementary school: We couldn’t find a survey that asked about grades 1–3 and grades 4–6 separately, so both use the elementary school range from KB Kookmin Card (2024): 30,000–50,000 won. Grades 1–3 get the lower end, 30,000 won, as their default amount. Grades 4–6 get the upper end, 50,000 won.
• Middle school and high school: Both use the range KB Kookmin Card (2024) reported for middle and high schoolers together: 50,000–100,000 won. In Kakao Pay’s (2025) transfer data, 100,000 won overtook 50,000 won for the first time as the amount middle and high schoolers received. The calculator applies that shift to high school. The default amount is 50,000 won for middle school and 100,000 won for high school.
• College students, and job seekers and early-career adults: Lotte Members (2024) asked about these two groups separately. The range was 50,000–100,000 won for college students and 100,000–200,000 won for job seekers and early-career adults. College students get a default amount of 100,000 won. Job seekers and early-career adults get 150,000 won, halfway between the two most common answers (100,000 won and 200,000 won).
• Parents and elders: The reference range is 200,000–300,000 won. The default amount is the upper end, 300,000 won.

Rule 2, which recommends different amounts for different relationships, does not come from a survey. Only one survey item looks at who the money is for: the niece and nephew question in the Danggeun Market (2025) poll. The calculator’s own reasoning is that close relationships get the default amount, while a more formal relationship gets the minimum, the lowest amount in the reference range.

What happens when you set a total budget

1. If the total is no more than your total budget, nothing changes.
2. If the total is over your total budget, the calculator picks one row to lower. It goes by relationship in this order: child of a friend or acquaintance, relative’s child, niece/nephew, my child, and finally parent / elder. Within one relationship, the row with the larger amount goes first.
3. That row moves down one step on the list of commonly used amounts.
4. A row that is already at the minimum of its reference range is skipped. So is a row whose recommended amount came out below the minimum because of the “Amount they gave your child” you entered. It isn’t lowered any further.
5. Steps 2–4 repeat until the total is no more than your total budget.
6. If every row is at or below its minimum and the total is still too high, the calculator tells you how much your budget falls short.

Relatives’ children and the children of friends and acquaintances already start at the minimum under rule 2. So unless you entered an “Amount they gave your child” for them, their amounts can’t drop any further. Rows where you did enter one are lowered in the same order when the total is over your total budget.

Here is an example. Suppose you enter one niece or nephew in high school (100,000 won), one relative’s child in middle school (50,000 won) and two parents (300,000 won each). That comes to 750,000 won, and your total budget is 700,000 won.

1. The relative’s child is already at the minimum (50,000 won), so that row is skipped.
2. The niece or nephew is next in line and goes from 100,000 won to 70,000 won. The total is now 720,000 won.
3. That is still over your total budget, so the niece or nephew goes from 70,000 won to 50,000 won. The total is now 700,000 won.
4. The amounts for your parents and the relative’s child stay as they were.

What the surveys found

The “Reference amount” you see on screen is taken from this table. “Most common” means the answer more respondents gave than any other.

For any relationship other than niece/nephew, the screen shows the value from the row in the table above whose Relationship column reads Not broken down. A niece or nephew who is a job seeker or early-career adult gets the value from that row too.

This is what each source contributes to the table.

• KB Kookmin Card (2024): A survey of about 400 members of its customer panel. The amounts they considered reasonable were 10,000 won for preschoolers, 30,000–50,000 won for elementary schoolers, 50,000–100,000 won for middle and high schoolers, and around 100,000 won for adult children.
• JobKorea (2018): A survey of 1,383 office workers. The most common answer was 10,000 won (52.6%) for preschoolers and elementary schoolers, and 100,000 won (36.6%) for college students.
• Kakao Pay (2025): Transfer data, not a survey. Among the amounts middle and high schoolers received, 100,000 won (42%) overtook 50,000 won (37%) for the first time. Holiday money sent to the parents’ generation averaged 227,000 won (190,000 won from people in their 20s, 220,000 won in their 30s and 230,000 won in their 40s).
• Danggeun Market (2025): For nieces and nephews, the most common answer was 50,000 won (38%). The poll treated everyone from preschoolers to high schoolers as one group, which is why the table shows the same most common amount (50,000 won) across that whole span. For nieces and nephews in college, the most common answer was 100,000 won. For parents and elders, it was 300,000 won (31%).
• Lotte Members (2024): A nationwide survey of 2,000 people aged 20 and older. For college students, the most common answer was 50,000–100,000 won. For job seekers and early-career adults, it was 100,000–200,000 won: 33.8% chose 100,000 won and 31.6% chose 200,000 won.

The reference range for parents and elders (200,000–300,000 won) is one the calculator put together from the Kakao Pay and Danggeun Market figures. We couldn’t find a survey that looked separately at money given to a spouse’s parents or to grandparents, so they share the same reference amount.

New Year money has been getting bigger in recent years. In Kakao Pay’s transfer data, the average amount middle and high schoolers received rose from 54,000 won in 2021 to 74,000 won in 2024. In the JobKorea survey, the average total budget rose from 169,000 won in 2016 to 186,000 won in 2018.

Why the surveys don’t agree

No two surveys ask the same people in the same way, so the amount for one school level shifts from survey to survey. Two things drive the gap.

People who give and people who receive have different expectations. Woori Bank put the question to 3,729 teenagers directly. They hoped for 100,000 won per adult. What they actually received was 50,000 won per person.

How the question is worded changes the answer. Two surveys came out pointing in opposite directions.

In the Albachunguk survey, the people who said they mostly give were mainly married and in their 30s or older. Those who said they mostly receive were mainly unmarried and in their 20s. Because the two surveys asked different questions, their results are hard to set side by side.

What this calculator doesn’t cover

• New Year money from grandparents to grandchildren: We couldn’t find a survey that looked at it separately, so it isn’t on the list of relationships.
• Regional differences: We couldn’t find a survey that looked at them separately, so the calculator doesn’t account for them.
• Separate amounts for your spouse’s parents and for grandparents: They are all calculated as one group, parents and elders.

The recommended amount is a guide worked out from the surveys and the rules above. Nobody is obliged to give exactly that much. Adjust it to fit your family’s budget and your relationships.