What Internationals Actually Pay for a Share House in Seoul (Q3 2026 Data)

A private room in a Seoul share house costs a median ₩1,000,000 a month right now, with rooms ranging ₩700,000 to ₩2,100,000 across our published houses (SharedHomies data, Apr–Aug 2026, n=45 rooms). Itaewon (이태원), Hongdae (홍대) and Gwanak (관악구) have the lowest medians at ₩950,000, Seodaemun-gu (서대문) has the cheapest single room at ₩700,000, and Gwanghwamun (광화문) sits highest on a small two-room sample. The deposit is one month's rent, refundable within 14 days of move-out — no jeonse-style lump sum, no key money required. Internationals who contact us mostly budget ₩700,000–₩900,000 a month (60.5% of leads who gave a range), which sits below where most rooms are actually priced.

This is the Q3 2026 edition of a quarterly series pulling live numbers from our own room pricing and lead intake. This edition covers April–August 2026; we'll republish it every quarter with fresh figures.

How much does a share house room cost by neighborhood in Seoul?

Room prices vary by area more than almost anything else. Here's what 45 individual room listings across our 20 published houses actually cost, by neighborhood, as of this data pull (two "whole house" listings — entire-house rentals rather than individual rooms — are excluded so the numbers reflect a single room in a shared house, the product most internationals are actually comparing):

Gwanghwamun's sample is small (n=2) and skews toward larger, higher-spec rooms near Gyeongbokgung — treat it as a data point, not a neighborhood average yet. Outside that, the pattern holds across every area: medians cluster tightly in the ₩950,000–₩1,018,000 band, and the spread between an area's cheapest and priciest room comes down to room size and floor level more than location.

Does it cost more to live in a coed house or a female-only house?

A little, and the direction is the opposite of what most people guess. Across the same 45 rooms, coed houses run a slightly higher median than female-only houses:

The gap is small (₩25,000 at the median) and both distributions overlap heavily — female-only houses span the same ₩800,000–₩1,500,000 range that most coed houses sit in, just without coed's few higher-priced outlier rooms pulling the top end up. Gender policy on its own isn't a reliable price signal; area and room size explain far more of the spread.

What do internationals actually budget — and does it match what's on the market?

This is the gap that matters most for anyone house-hunting. Looking at leads who told us both a minimum and maximum monthly budget (SharedHomies data, leads created Apr 1–Aug 31, 2026, n=43, test/probe/internal rows excluded), most cluster well below where rooms are actually priced:

The mismatch is stark at the bottom: 27.9% of leads set a ₩500,000–700,000 budget, and zero of our 45 rooms fall in that band — our cheapest room is ₩700,000. Meanwhile 66.6% of rooms are priced above ₩900,000, but only 11.6% of leads who gave a range budgeted that high. Read plainly: the typical inbound lead is budgeting for the bottom of the market, and the typical available room sits in the middle to upper third of it. (Separately, leads who gave only one number: budget_min alone has a median of ₩700,000 across 44 leads; budget_max alone has a median of ₩900,000 across 51 leads — consistent with the paired-budget picture above.)

That gap isn't a reason to panic — it usually closes once someone weighs the all-inclusive pricing (utilities, Wi-Fi, cleaning, no separate deposits for gas or internet) against a comparable direct wolse lease. But it does mean most people should walk in expecting ₩900,000–₩1,000,000 for a typical room, not the ₩700,000–₩800,000 they first budget.

What's the deposit, and is "no deposit" ever true for a share house?

The deposit at SharedHomies is one month's rent, refundable within 14 days of move-out — not a lump sum, not held by a third party. That's a fundamentally different structure from a traditional jeonse (전세) lease, where tenants hand over a deposit worth many months' or even years' rent in exchange for a lower or zero monthly payment; see our full breakdown of jeonse vs wolse vs key money for how that compares to a normal Korean wolse (월세) lease.

"No deposit" is genuinely true of some housing categories in Seoul — gosiwon (고시원) and some serviced-apartment operators typically don't collect one. It is not true of co-living: every SharedHomies room carries the refundable one-month deposit above. What is true, and what actually differentiates co-living from a direct landlord lease, is no key money — you're never asked for a jeonse-style lump sum on top of monthly rent.

How does this compare to Seoul's citywide rent?

Seoul's wider rental market has been shifting hard toward monthly rent (월세) over the past year as jeonse supply tightens. According to Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) actual-transaction data reported via the Korea Real Estate Board, 41.6% of Seoul apartment monthly-rent contracts signed in the first half of 2026 carried a monthly rent over ₩1,000,000 — up from 39.7% in the same period a year earlier (Seoul Economic Daily, "Four in 10 Seoul Apartment Monthly Rents Now Top 1 Million Won," Jul 7, 2026).

That's a citywide apartment-rental figure, not a like-for-like comparison to a single room in a share house — but it's useful context: our ₩1,000,000 median room rent sits right at the threshold that now applies to 4 in 10 Seoul apartment leases overall, for a fully furnished, all-inclusive private room rather than an entire unit you'd still need to furnish, insure, and pay separate utility deposits on. For the fuller cost picture of a direct lease versus a bundled monthly rental, see our monthly rentals in Seoul cost breakdown.

How much more should you budget for winter heating?

Room rent isn't the whole monthly number. Gas heating (ondol/온돌 floor heating) swings hard by season in Seoul: across our own houses, the winter monthly average per house runs ₩57,000 to ₩180,000, hitting as high as ₩299,770 in one house's worst January — about 6.8 times the summer average. See the full house-by-house breakdown in what a Seoul winter gas bill actually costs. At SharedHomies, utilities are bundled into rent up to a combined gas-and-electricity threshold, so most months this doesn't change your monthly number at all — but it's worth knowing before you commit to a direct lease where you'd pay the full swing yourself.

Where does this data come from, and what's excluded?

Room pricing: every room listed on 20 published SharedHomies houses as of this data pull, n=47 total room listings, with 2 "whole house" (entire-unit) listings excluded to leave n=45 individual room prices — those are a different product from a room in a shared house and would skew the numbers.

Lead budgets: every lead captured between April 1 and August 31, 2026 (n=304 raw), with rows excluded whose email address contained "test," "probe," "audit," "duck.com," "example," "invalid," or matched the site owner's own address (290 remain). Of those, budget figures come from the subset that actually filled in a budget range (n=43 for the paired min-and-max bucket table; n=44 and n=51 respectively for leads who gave only a minimum or only a maximum). We do not publish conversion rates from this dataset.

None of this is a promise about what you specifically will pay — it's what the market looked like across our own rooms and inbound leads this quarter. For the full picture of renting in Seoul as a foreigner — contracts, guarantors, ARC registration, and how co-living compares to a direct lease — start with our pillar guide to renting in Seoul as a foreigner. To see current room prices for yourself, browse available rooms or see our houses.