▲ A person walks down a street in Busan, some 330 kilometers southeast of Seoul, on March 4, 2026, underneath a tree blossoming with white flowers. (Yonhap)

S Korea-life quality

S. Koreans' life satisfaction unchanged in 2024; suicide rate up: report

SEOUL, March 5 (Yonhap) -- South Koreans' average satisfaction with life remained unchanged from a year earlier in 2024, while the suicide rate went up, a government report showed Thursday.

The level of life satisfaction came to 6.4 points on a 10-point scale in 2024, remaining unchanged from 2023, according to the annual report on South Koreans' quality of life by the Ministry of Data and Statistics.

Income appeared to have affected life satisfaction, as the life satisfaction score was the lowest among households in the lowest income bracket with a monthly income of less than 1 million won (US$681.7), at 5.8 points.

In contrast, life satisfaction levels in households that earned 3 million won or more per month ranged from 6.4 to 6.5 points, nearly on par with the average for the entire population, the ministry said.

In the report, the ministry cited a separate report published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network to compare South Koreans' level of life satisfaction with other member countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation (OECD).

South Korea ranked 33rd among the 38 OECD countries in terms of a three-year average of life satisfaction from 2022 to 2024 at 6.04 points.

The reading is also lower than the OECD average of 6.5, according to the ministry.

Meanwhile, the number of suicides per 100,000 people rose 1.8 from a year earlier to 29.1 in 2024, marking a second consecutive year of increase. The figure also marked the highest since 2011, when the country recorded 31.7 suicides per 100,000 people, the ministry said.

The report also showed that people's average level of negative emotion, which measures the level of depression and anxiety felt by South Koreans on a 10-point scale, worsened in 2024, as the figure went up 0.7 point on-year to 3.8.

Age seemed to affect the level of negative emotion. The negative emotion level was the highest among those aged 60 and older, while the lowest among people in their 20s, the survey showed.

South Korea's gross national income stood at 43.8 million won per person in 2024, up by 3.5 percent from a year earlier. Wage inequality, however, grew, with the country's relative poverty rate rising 0.4 percentage point during the cited period, to 15.3 percent.

Additionally, the employment rate of university graduates fell 0.8 percentage point to 69.5 percent last year, marking the first on-year decline since 2020, when the figure fell by 2 percentage points to 65.1 percent.

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