77 Singers in the 'Top 1%' Earned 355.5 Billion Won Annually... Accounting for 70% of Total Singer Income

Average Income per Singer in 2021: 66.79 Million KRW
Top 1% Consists of 77 People... Total Earnings of 355.5 Billion KRW

The average income per singer in 2021 was found to be 66.79 million KRW. Among them, singers in the top 1% earned approximately 4.6 billion KRW.

According to the '2017?2021 Income Status of Entertainers by Industry' received from the National Tax Service on the 30th by Kang Jun-hyun, a member of the National Assembly's Planning and Finance Committee from the Democratic Party of Korea, the total annual income of 7,720 singers who reported income in 2021 was 515.645 billion KRW. The average income per person was 66.79 million KRW.

Singers, actors, professional athletes, and others provide personal services as individual business operators even if they belong to a company or team, so their business income is subject to withholding tax.

Among them, the top 1%, consisting of 77 people, earned a total of 355.566 billion KRW. This accounts for 68.9% of the total income of singers. The average income per person in the top 1% was 4.61774 billion KRW.

In the case of actors, as of 2021, the top 1% (160 people) earned 382.938 billion KRW, which is 48.6% of the total. They earned an average of 2.2659 billion KRW per person.

One of the highest-earning singers in South Korea, Lim Young-woong [Image source: Provided by Mulgochi Music]

In the same year, 9,536 models earned a total of 17.567 billion KRW, with an average income of 11.28 million KRW per person. The top 1%, consisting of 95 people, earned 43.039 billion KRW, averaging 453.04 million KRW per person.

Meanwhile, during the COVID-19 pandemic, as concerts and other events decreased, the average income of singers and actors also declined.

The average income of the top 1% of singers was 3.13436 billion KRW in 2017 and 3.44698 billion KRW in 2018, but it dropped to 2.25607 billion KRW in 2019, the first year of the COVID-19 outbreak, and further decreased to 1.76652 billion KRW in 2020.

This appears to be due to a decrease in events and income following the spread of COVID-19. According to the Korea Arts Management Service's integrated performing arts database (KOPIS), performing arts sales, which reached 185.9 billion KRW in the second half of 2019, plummeted by 49.2% to 96.1 billion KRW in the first half of 2020. Subsequently, it further decreased to 74.7 billion KRW in the second half of 2020.

Actors reported income of 583.417 billion KRW from 17,977 people in 2020, earning an average of 32.45 million KRW per person. This is about 2.5 million KRW less than in 2019 (35.07 million KRW).