South Korea Opens Its Employment Permit System to Kazakhstan, With Workers Expected From 2028

South Korea has added Kazakhstan to the list of countries it recruits low-skilled labour from, designating it on 14 August as the 18th sending country under the Employment Permit System. The decision was taken at the 49th meeting of the government's Foreign Workforce Policy Committee, presided over by Lim Ki-keun, Minister of the Office for Government Policy Coordination. Kazakh nationals cannot apply yet. The first substantial arrivals are expected in 2028, after the two governments sign a memorandum of understanding and Korean-language testing centres are established in Kazakhstan. For Kazakh workers, this creates a route into a high-income labour market that has been closed to them; for anyone tracking how structured labour migration works in Asia, it is a rare expansion at a time when the programme's overall intake has been shrinking.

Background

The Employment Permit System, usually shortened to EPS, is how South Korea brings in workers for jobs that do not require professional qualifications. It is deliberately government-to-government: Korea signs a memorandum of understanding with each sending country, that country's own agency recruits and screens candidates, and the two states run the process between them rather than leaving it to private brokers. Candidates sit EPS-TOPIK, a Korean-language test, and successful applicants enter a pool from which Korean employers select. Workers arrive on the E-9 visa, which covers non-professional employment. Before this decision the programme had 17 partners: the Philippines, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Cambodia, China, Bangladesh, Kyrgyzstan, East Timor, Nepal, Myanmar, Laos and Tajikistan. Kazakhstan makes 18. The expansion sits against a falling headline number: the 2026 E-9 quota was set at 80,000, down from 130,000 in 2025 and 165,000 in 2024, with the government citing demand for foreign labour returning to pre-pandemic levels and fewer vacancies in manufacturing and construction. Adding a country is therefore about widening the range of sources rather than increasing the total.

What exactly changed

The committee designated Kazakhstan as an EPS sending country and set out why. Officials pointed to the fact that Kazakhstan has dedicated government and public institutions handling labour dispatch, which the Korean side treated as a basis for keeping recruitment public and transparent, and to the country's existing infrastructure: pre-departure training facilities, EPS centre capacity and health screening, along with a stated commitment to preventing overstays. Kazakhstan becomes the fourth Central Asian country in the programme, after Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Designation is the first step rather than the last. Before Kazakh nationals can actually apply, the two governments need to conclude a memorandum of understanding, and EPS-TOPIK testing capacity has to be built in Kazakhstan so candidates can sit the Korean-language exam locally. That groundwork is what sets the 2028 start for meaningful arrivals. Once inside the system, E-9 workers can be placed in manufacturing, construction, agriculture, livestock, fisheries, hospitality and cleaning, and the E-9 permit allows a stay of at least three years with the possibility of extension by up to a further 22 months.

The construction change agreed at the same meeting

The committee also loosened how E-9 workers move between construction sites. Where the restriction previously attached to an individual project, a worker can now be transferred between sites run by the same construction company, provided the receiving site meets the permit conditions. That takes effect with the fourth round of hiring applications in September. The other half of the change runs the opposite way: employment restrictions for rule violations shift from the project level to the employer level, so a violation by one company bars it from hiring foreign workers at any of its sites. That part starts in March 2027 after a six-month grace period.

Who it affects

The direct group is Kazakh nationals considering work abroad in manual and service sectors, who until now had no EPS route and had to look to Russia, Turkey or the Gulf. For them the significant feature of EPS is not the wage alone but the structure: recruitment runs through state agencies on both sides, which removes the recruitment-agent fees and debt that characterise a lot of low-skilled labour migration in the region. The practical catch is the timeline. Someone reading this in Almaty cannot begin an application, and the Korean-language requirement means the preparation that matters, learning enough Korean to pass EPS-TOPIK, starts long before any test centre opens. The second group is Korean employers in the covered sectors, who gain another recruitment pool while the overall quota continues to fall.

What this means in practice

If you are a Kazakh national interested in this route, the thing to watch for is the memorandum of understanding between the two governments and the announcement of EPS-TOPIK testing arrangements in Kazakhstan. Those are the events that turn a designation into an application process. Until then there is nothing to apply to, and any agent offering to place you in the Korean EPS programme now is not working from an existing route. The official EPS portal run by the Korean government is where sending-country lists and test schedules are published, and it is the only place worth treating as authoritative on when applications open. Our South Korea country guide (/country-guides/south-korea) covers what living and working there involves, and our Kazakhstan guide (/country-guides/kazakhstan) covers the picture at the other end.