Kimjang (김장, Korea’s annual kimchi-making season) is objectively cheaper than it was a year ago — the average family’s cost fell 5.6% between 2024 and 2025, per government data. Yet a 2024 survey found 72% of households planned to skip it anyway. The real reason isn’t money.
My Mother-in-Law Just Asked: Are We Doing Kimjang This Year?
My mother-in-law called in late September, the way she does every year around this time, and asked the same question she’s asked for as long as I’ve been married into this family: are we doing kimjang together this year. It’s not really a question, in the way that a lot of her questions aren’t really questions — it’s a scheduling notice with a grace period. This is the same mother-in-law whose Saturday babysitting hours I once tried to run through a government childcare-allowance spreadsheet, so I know better than to treat her calls as casual. She wants a yes or a no, and she wants it before the cabbage gets expensive, or so she believes.
I said yes. I always do.
The call stuck with me this year for a different reason. I’d just read that the average Korean family’s kimjang bill actually went down last year, not up — and that a striking share of households, nationally, are opting out anyway. So I sat with the numbers before I sat with the cabbage, and the gap between what everyone assumes and what the government’s own price data shows turned out to be the more interesting story.
What Is Kimjang, and Why Is It a UNESCO-Listed Tradition?
Kimjang isn’t a single cooking session — it’s a household logistics operation that runs most of the year and culminates in one intense day (or weekend) of assembly, and UNESCO recognized it as such in 2013, inscribing it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. What gets listed isn’t a recipe; it’s the practice of collectively making and sharing large batches of kimchi, plus the fact that the specific methods and seasoning ratios are treated as family heritage, passed down the line that matters most in this tradition: mother-in-law to daughter-in-law.
That transmission structure is why my mother-in-law’s phone call carries more weight than an ordinary invitation. The actual prep cycle starts long before the cabbage shows up. Shrimp and anchovy get bought and salted in spring for jeotgal (젓갈, salted fermented seafood used as a seasoning base), sea salt gets bought in summer for the brine that draws water out of the cabbage, and red chili peppers get dried and ground in late summer. By the time late autumn arrives and the cabbage-and-seasoning assembly — kimjang day itself — actually happens, most families have already spent months sourcing and prepping. What outsiders see as “a day of making kimchi” is really the last step of a calendar that started around Buddha’s Birthday.
Has Kimjang Actually Gotten Too Expensive?
This is the assumption I walked into the phone call with, and it’s the assumption baked into most English-language writing about kimjang’s decline: people are quietly giving up on it because it costs too much now, so store-bought kimchi has become the rational choice. It’s a tidy explanation, and it lines up with a real data point — a 2024 NongHyup (농협, Korea’s agricultural cooperative) survey found that rising ingredient costs were the single most-cited reason households gave for skipping kimjang that year, with roughly 30.8% of surveyed households specifically naming rising material costs as their reason for opting out.
The problem is that this explanation only holds if the price trend keeps moving in one direction, and it didn’t. The same government agency that tracks these prices published a very different number for the following year — one that never seems to make it into the “it’s just gotten too expensive” version of this story, including the two most-cited English-language pieces on kimjang I could find, which state the shift to store-bought kimchi as fact without checking it against a single year-over-year figure.
What Does the Government’s Own 2024–2025 Price Data Actually Show?
Here’s the part that surprised me. According to the Korea Agro-Fisheries & Food Trade Corporation (aT), the total kimjang cost for a typical 4-person household — about 20 heads of napa cabbage plus radish, seasonings, and seafood — fell from ₩213,003 in 2024 to ₩201,151 in 2025. That’s a 5.6% year-over-year decline, driven by a record-scale government kimjang discount program and a stronger cabbage harvest.
| Metric (aT data) | 2025 figure | Change vs. 2024 / benchmark |
|---|---|---|
| Total kimjang cost, 4-person household (~20 cabbage heads) | ₩201,151 | -5.6% YoY (from ₩213,003 in 2024) |
| Single napa cabbage (Changwon benchmark, mid-Nov) | ₩3,533 | -10% YoY, -23.5% vs. 5-year average |
| Radish (무) | — | About 24% below the same week a year earlier (vs. the 5-year average, radish ran slightly above) |
The cabbage-level number backs up the household-level number. A single head of napa cabbage averaged ₩3,533 in mid-November 2025, using the Changwon benchmark aT tracks — 10% cheaper than the same week a year earlier, and 23.5% below the five-year average. Radish told a slightly different story: it ran about 24% below the same week a year earlier, but slightly above the five-year average — the kind of distinction that matters if you’re comparing to “normal” rather than to last year’s spike. A companion price report from the same week did note a small rebound in cabbage prices off their lows, with radish continuing to fall, so it’s not a flat, uninterrupted slide — but the two-year direction is unmistakable: cheaper, not more expensive. If I take my own family’s kimjang order — 20 heads of cabbage, radish, the seafood and seasoning — and price it at 2025 levels instead of 2024 levels, the difference is stark.
I’m looking at roughly twelve thousand fewer won, not twelve thousand more.
So Why Are 72% of Households Skipping Kimjang Anyway?
This is where the survey numbers stop being reassuring. In a late-2024 NongHyup survey conducted through its Wolgan Nonghyup Matseon subscription platform, 92.1% of respondents said they identified with the label kimpo-jok (김포족, roughly “the kimjang-giving-up tribe” — a play on words combining kimjang with the verb “to give up”), and 72% said they personally planned to skip doing kimjang that year. Of that 72%, 88.7% said they’d buy pre-made packaged kimchi instead, and 84.3% of those planned to do it through online channels rather than a store visit.
Line the two data sets up next to each other and the “it’s too expensive” story doesn’t survive contact with the numbers. The household cost went down. The opt-out rate stayed high. What the survey actually captures, once you set the cost explanation aside, is a household-structure and convenience story: fewer people per household to feed, less storage space for two months of kimchi in a Seoul apartment without a dedicated kimchi fridge, no extended family nearby to split a full kimjang day with, and a packaged-kimchi market that’s gotten genuinely good enough that skipping the labor doesn’t feel like a compromise anymore. Buying online, pre-made, in exactly the quantity you’ll eat is simply a better fit for how a lot of Korean households are actually shaped now — smaller, busier, more solo — regardless of what a single head of cabbage costs that November.
What I Told My Mother-in-Law — and What November 2026 Looks Like
I told her yes, obviously, and I didn’t bring up the price data, because that’s not really what the phone call was about. What I did start paying attention to, after running these numbers, is the timing. Ipdong (입동, “start of winter”), the traditional marker for the beginning of kimjang season, falls on November 7, 2026. Most families do their actual kimjang from late October through early or mid-November, and prices tend to settle once the fall cabbage harvest fully floods the market from mid-November into December. My mother-in-law calls in September and not in November — and I’d guess she’s trying to beat the crowd, not the price.
For 2026 specifically, the early signals are good rather than tight: Korean agricultural-policy sources are pointing to an expanded planting area and favorable autumn weather, with authorities projecting a supply “green light” and fall-cabbage shipments ramping up from mid-October through the November–December kimjang peak. If the pattern from 2025 holds, that points toward another year of stable-to-cheaper cabbage, not another price spike — which means next September’s phone call will probably start from the same place this one did. The cost argument was never really the reason my in-laws still do this, and it’s clearly not the reason most Korean households are stepping back from it either. Here’s the part nobody tells you: if someone invites you to a kimjang gathering this year and you assume you’re being handed an expensive favor, you’re mostly being handed a Saturday, some salt-stained gloves, and a very full refrigerator by evening.