Survey: nearly 8 in 10 unmarried Koreans accept living together before marriage

A March 2026 Embrain survey of 1,050 unmarried South Koreans found that 79.4 percent now consider cohabitation before marriage acceptable, according to health portal Kormedi.com — the highest level of support recorded in the firm's comparable surveys since 2018.

The findings, drawn from longitudinal data spanning 2018 to 2026, document one of the sharpest cultural pivots in modern South Korea — a country where premarital cohabitation once carried deep social stigma and where policymakers are wrestling with one of the world's lowest birth rates.

Support for cohabitation as a practical prelude to marriage has grown steadily over eight years. The share of respondents who said living together before committing to marriage is wiser than rushing climbed from 54.6 percent in 2018 to 67.0 percent in 2026, according to Embrain data reported by Kormedi.com.

Approval was highest among younger adults, with more than 80 percent of respondents in their 20s and 30s expressing support for nonmarital cohabitation. Among all age groups, 60.9 percent showed the strongest backing for living together when marriage is the intended goal.

Even as social acceptance of premarital cohabitation has grown, support for extending formal legal protections to cohabiting couples has declined. Backing for granting cohabiting partners the same legal and social standing as married couples dropped from 55.0 percent in 2021 to 44.7 percent in 2026, the Embrain survey found.

Despite that ambivalence toward legal recognition, 74.8 percent of respondents agreed that South Korean society should broaden its acceptance of diverse family structures. Korea's Presidential Committee on Ageing Society and Population Policy has tracked related demographic shifts, including a rise in nonmarital births that approached 6 percent of all births in 2024 — still among the lowest rates in the developed world, but up significantly from prior years.

The Embrain survey results come as South Korea continues to record one of the world's lowest fertility rates. Whether shifting attitudes toward cohabitation will translate into measurable changes in family formation or birth rates remains an open question for demographers and policymakers alike.