Open pharmacy in Korea at night: 120 finds one, not 1339

Korea does publish a list of every clinic and pharmacy open tonight, and on a public holiday it publishes one for each day. The list is in Korean, and the English site of the agency that runs it has no search box. That one fact decides most of what follows.

The phone route is the other half. English guides still give 1339 as the number that finds you a doctor or a pharmacy at night. That job left 1339 in June 2012, and this Chuseok the health ministry names 129 and 120 for it.

Korean pharmacy open now: where the government list lives

The health ministry’s Chuseok release names every official route in one sentence. Open clinics and pharmacies can be looked up on the National Emergency Medical Center’s E-Gen website, on two apps called 응급똑똑 and 응급의료정보제공, and on local government websites, or by phone on 129, the ministry’s call centre, and 120, the city or province call centre. Seoul’s own release adds 119.

All of those are Korean services. E-Gen does have an English site, and it describes the agency, its systems and how to find its office. It does not search for anything. The search that matters lives on the Korean page for open clinics and pharmacies, and the results load after the page opens, so a quick glance at the address gives you a form and nothing else.

So treat it as a Korean page you drive with translation switched on. Three words are enough to read the results:

If a browser is not an option, 120 in Seoul is the call to make. Seoul’s release names 120 for exactly this, alongside 119. This page did not test which languages 129 answers in, so assume Korean until it proves otherwise. Any of this needs mobile data, which is one of the reasons the eSIM or SIM question matters more on a holiday than on a working day.

Why 1339 is the wrong number

1339 used to be the emergency medical advice line. On 22 June 2012 the health ministry and the fire agency retired it into 119, and for a year a call to 1339 was forwarded automatically. The forwarding stopped on 22 June 2013. The 2012 notice gave 119 the round-the-clock medical advice and the guidance to clinics and pharmacies. Fourteen years on, the ministry’s Chuseok release keeps 119 for serious symptoms and sends everyone else to the finder, 129 or 120. Seoul’s release still lists 119 among its routes.

The number itself did not disappear. 1339 today is the call centre of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, and the services it lists are about infectious diseases. Finding a pharmacy is not among them. A Korea Times guide published on 14 March 2026 gets the first half right, naming the agency as the operator of 1339, and in the same article tells readers to call 1339 to find a late-night pharmacy.

So treat 1339 as the number for an outbreak question, 120 or 129 as the numbers for an open pharmacy, and 119 as the number for anything serious. For the lines that answer in English, and at which hours, see Korea’s emergency numbers in English.

Chuseok 2026: the day with the fewest open

The holiday runs from Thursday 24 to Sunday 27 September. The ministry’s release gives the daily count of clinics and pharmacies expected to open nationwide, and the numbers fall off sharply in the middle.

Across the four days that is an average of 8,294 a day, of which 4,383 are pharmacies. The totals include 416 emergency medical institutions on 24-hour duty throughout, as they are all year, and the release lists 156 moonlight children’s hospitals, the clinics designated to see children out of hours.

Friday is the day to plan around. Fewer than half as many places are open as on Thursday, and fewer than 3,000 of them are pharmacies across the whole country. If you are carrying a prescription you know will run out, fill it on the Thursday.

Seoul publishes its own count: 2,568 hospitals and clinics and 3,621 pharmacies across the holiday, or 1,547 places a day on average, of which 905 are pharmacies.

24 hour pharmacy Seoul: what exists at night

Late-night pharmacies are a public scheme with a legal footing. An amendment to the Pharmaceutical Affairs Act lets a provincial governor, mayor or district head designate public late-night pharmacies that sell medicine late at night and on public holidays, and lets the local government fund them. The enforcement rule, in force from 12 July 2024, sets their hours at 8pm to 1am in principle.

How many there are depends on who is counting and when. Health ministry figures released through a lawmaker’s office put the total at 240 in July 2026, and the pharmacists’ trade paper printed that figure on 25 September. Treat it as a count that moves, not a directory. The directory is the E-Gen finder above.

So the honest answer to “is there a 24-hour pharmacy” is that the public scheme stops at 1am. After that the service the state guarantees is an emergency room.

Convenience store medicine Korea: 13 on the list, 11 on the shelf

Since 15 November 2012, 24-hour convenience stores have been allowed to sell a fixed list of household medicines. The health ministry’s page on the scheme, last updated on 31 March 2026, lists thirteen:

Showing the Korean name to a shop assistant is quicker than spelling out the English one.

Two of those are not for sale. The 160mg Tylenol tablet and the 80mg children’s Tylenol tablet were withdrawn in March 2022 when the manufacturer moved its factory abroad, according to trade press at the time, and a report this week counts eleven products actually on sale. The ministry page lists what is designated, which is still thirteen, and does not say which of them you can buy. So treat the list as thirteen names and the shelf as eleven.

The rules on the same page are short. The store must be open 24 hours a day all year, a sale is limited to one pack at a time, and nothing is sold to a child under 12.

Change may be coming, and slowly. The ministry is reported to be preparing to widen the list towards twenty products, and no revised notice had been issued as of this week. The eleven stand until one is.

How to see a doctor in Korea as a foreigner, and what it costs

A short-term visitor is outside Korea’s national health insurance. Foreign residents have been enrolled automatically since 16 July 2019, but only once they have lived in Korea for 6 months, so a tourist pays the full price of a visit. The government’s support programme for uninsured foreigners does not cover outpatient treatment in principle, and in any case is aimed at groups such as migrant workers and people applying for refugee status rather than visitors.

This page did not find an official figure for what an uninsured clinic visit costs, and the numbers in circulation come from individual blogs. Treat any of them as one clinic’s bill rather than a rate, keep every receipt, and check your travel insurance before the trip rather than after.

On a holiday, the clinic finder above is also the doctor finder. It lists the clinics that agreed to open that day, and the ministry asks people with mild symptoms to use those rather than an emergency room, so the emergency staff can concentrate on serious cases.

What is not checked here

• Today’s actual list. E-Gen’s results load by script after the page opens, and this page read the ministry’s counts rather than the list itself. The count tells you how thin Friday is. The list tells you where to go, and only the Korean page has it.
• Whether public late-night pharmacies open over Chuseok. The law lets them be designated for public holidays as well as late nights, but neither the ministry’s nor Seoul’s holiday release mentions them. Look for 공공심야약국 in the E-Gen results before counting on one.
• Which languages 129 and 120 answer in. The ministry and the city name them for this purpose and do not say. Seoul’s 120 is the better first try, and a short Korean phrase such as 약국 (pharmacy) will carry a call a long way.
• The withdrawal of the two Tylenol products. It is dated by trade press, not by a regulator’s notice this page could open. The practical advice is the same either way: expect eleven.
• The finder apps’ languages. The ministry names apps that carry the same list, and this page did not install them to see whether any offers English. Treat them as Korean until someone reports otherwise.
• Interpreting on 119. Regional fire services describe three-way interpreting for foreign callers, and this page found no national page setting out which languages and when.

If you found a pharmacy open on a holiday that the finder missed, or the reverse, tell me here and this page gets corrected with a date on it.

Questions people ask around this

Can I buy cold medicine at a Korean convenience store? Yes, two products: Pancol A and Panpyrin T, both on the ministry’s list. One pack per purchase, and not to a child under 12.

Can a pharmacy in Korea fill a prescription from home? Plan on seeing a Korean doctor for a new prescription. This page found no official statement either way on foreign prescriptions, so bring enough of any regular medicine for the whole trip.

Is an emergency room open on Chuseok? Yes. The ministry keeps 416 emergency medical institutions on 24-hour duty through the holiday, the same as any other day.