The nation will soon adopt the international standard of calculating a person's legal and social age.
The Ministry of Government Legislation on June 26 said the full-age counting system will take effect from June 28.
"This national task of the Yoon Suk Yeol administration seeks to alleviate social and administrative confusion and conflict arising from differing methods of legal and social age calculation," it added.
The country has three ways to count age. Full-year age counting means the number of years a person has lived starting from zero with a year added with every birthday. The traditional "Korean age" system that many use in the nation considers a baby a year old at birth and adds a year every Jan. 1, and the yearly age method calculates age by subtracting one's birth year from the current year.
Use of the full-age system will make every Korean a year or two younger than their Korean ages.
The reform will require the use of the full-age system in legal and public documents and contracts.
The new system, however, will not apply in elementary school entrance, the draft, purchases of tobacco or alcohol under juvenile protection laws and civil service exams.
The revision will also incur no change in financial transactions. Late last year, the Financial Supervisory Service said the new system will have no effect on such transactions or customers because related rules are already all based on the full-year age system.
Also to stay the same is "insurance age," which is commonly used to calculate age in insurance. If an insurance contract's date is within six months of the insured person's birthday, the age applied at the time is the full-year age, but if over half a year has passed, a year is added to his or her age.
"The standardization of the full-year age system will slash the social cost of unnecessary cases caused by confusion from existing age counting methods," Minister of Government Legislation Lee Wan-kyu said on June 26. "The full-year age method is a rational calculation system that accurately reflects the actual period of a person's life, and I expect the new system to serve as a chance to change social perception of age in daily life."
By Yoon Sojung
arete@korea.kr