Seoul relaunched its foreign-resident services site as MY SEOUL+ (global.seoul.go.kr) on September 1, 2026 — a browser-only hub, no app required, covering visa-extension info, housing, healthcare, childcare, job placement, and bookable counseling in one login. It doesn’t replace HiKorea or the 1345 hotline, and that boundary is the part launch coverage skipped.
I know that boundary exists because I’ve spent the last two years being the person a coworker calls when Seoul’s foreign-resident system doesn’t make sense. Not because I’m an immigration expert — I build internal systems for a Korean financial company, which somehow makes people assume I understand every other system too — but because I’m the one sitting three desks away with functional Korean and a functional lunch break.
The Three-Door Mess I Used to Walk Coworkers Through
Before this week, “where do I go for that” had at least three different answers depending on what “that” was. If it was visa paperwork, you called 1345 (외국인종합안내센터, oegugin jonghap annae senteo — literally the “Foreign Resident Comprehensive Information Center”), the national hotline that answers in 20 languages. If it was something more local — a Korean class, a legal-aid session, a place to actually sit down with a person — you went to the Seoul Global Center (서울글로벌센터) in person, which is exactly what I did with a coworker two years ago, translating his questions into Korean at a front desk while he stood there nodding at words neither of us fully caught.
And if you wanted something on your phone, there was an app the city put out called MySeoul. I downloaded it myself, out of the same reflex that makes me test every internal tool at work before I trust it with real data. I opened it twice, found a static list of notices that hadn’t updated in a while, and never opened it a third time. I’m not exaggerating the “nobody used it” line for effect — I checked, and I genuinely could not find a single coworker who had it installed when I asked around this week.
None of those three doors talked to each other. The hotline didn’t know what the center’s calendar looked like. The center’s front-desk binder didn’t know what was on the app. The app didn’t know either place existed. Every foreign resident I helped ended up doing the routing themselves, by trial, which is a strange thing to ask of someone who’s also trying to figure out a lease and a work visa in a language they’re still learning.
What MY SEOUL+ Actually Puts in One Place
The new site is built to close exactly that gap, and on paper it does a lot of it: visa-extension information, housing-rights guidance, healthcare access info, childcare resources, job placement, bookable Korean-language and cultural classes, and schedulable legal and labor counseling sessions, all under one account. It also adds two things none of the old three doors had — an AI chatbot for quick questions and a map-based finder for physical facilities, so “where is the nearest place that handles this” stops being a separate research project.
According to the city’s own release, the platform it replaces “functioned largely as static bulletin boards” — which, having actually used that old MySeoul app, tracks with my experience exactly. A Seoul Metropolitan Government official from the city’s Global City Policy Bureau framed the redesign as user-perspective-first, aimed at making sure no foreign resident misses support just because the information was scattered across three places or written in a language they couldn’t parse. That’s a real problem to solve — Seoul’s own count puts its foreign-resident population at roughly 440,000, about 4.7% of registered residents, or roughly 1 in every 21 people in the city; Korea Times’ launch coverage rounds the same figure to “more than 400,000.” Either number is a lot of people who used to need three separate logins for one life.
Zoom out and the timing makes more sense. Korea’s nationwide registered foreign-resident population crossed 2.8 million for the first time in October 2025 — 2,837,525 people, up from about 2.65 million the year before. Seoul isn’t building this because foreign residency is a niche edge case anymore; it’s building it because the old bulletin-board approach stopped scaling a while ago.
The Scope Table Nobody Published: What Still Sends You Back to the Old Channel
Here’s the part that matters more than the feature list, and the part none of the launch-day coverage — English or Korean — actually laid out: which of the old three-plus-two touchpoints does MY SEOUL+ genuinely absorb, and which ones still exist because they have to. I mapped it out the way I’d map a system migration at work, because that’s honestly the closest comparison.
| Old touchpoint | What it used to handle | Now on MY SEOUL+? |
|---|---|---|
| Seoul Global Center | In-person consultation, classes, referrals | Yes — bookable classes/counseling moved online |
| Seoul Foreign Resident Center | Local resident support services | Yes — folded into the unified hub |
| Global Village Centers | District-level community programs | Yes — listed via the map-based finder |
| Old MySeoul app | Static notices, no interactivity | Retired — replaced entirely by the browser hub |
| HiKorea | National visa e-filing, permit applications | No — stays the only place to actually file |
| 1345 hotline | 20-language phone consultation, national scope | No — stays the only 20-language phone line |
The pattern is clean once you see it laid out: the four city-run, in-person or app-based touchpoints all fold into MY SEOUL+. The two national-government touchpoints don’t, and can’t, because they’re run by a different level of government with different legal authority. MY SEOUL+ can walk you through what a visa extension involves and even let you book a counseling slot to talk it through with a person — it just can’t actually submit the paperwork or issue anything. That last step still routes to HiKorea, the Ministry of Justice’s own portal, every time.
Four Languages Built In, Dozens Auto-Translated — What That Actually Means
Core content on MY SEOUL+ ships natively in four languages: Korean, English, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Everything outside that core set gets machine translation, which the city describes as covering “dozens” of additional languages. In practice, that’s a real gap worth knowing about before you rely on it for anything with legal weight.
I’d trust auto-translated text for browsing — figuring out which class to book, what a childcare program covers, whether a facility near you handles a specific service. I would not trust it, sight unseen, for anything where a mistranslated word changes an eligibility answer, the kind of thing that already trips people up on official Korean forms even in the four fully-supported languages. If your first language isn’t one of the core four and the stakes are high — a visa question, a housing dispute — that’s still a moment to call 1345 and get a human on the line in your own language, not lean on a translate button and hope the nuance survived.
Quick Answers
What is MY SEOUL+?
It’s Seoul’s relaunched foreign-resident services hub at global.seoul.go.kr, live since September 1, 2026. It’s browser-based — no app install needed — and consolidates services from the Seoul Global Center, Seoul Foreign Resident Center, and Global Village Centers.
Does MY SEOUL+ replace HiKorea?
No. MY SEOUL+ is a city (municipal) platform; HiKorea is the Ministry of Justice’s national portal for actual visa e-filing and permit issuance. Visa content on MY SEOUL+ is informational and counseling-booking only.
Do I still need to call 1345?
Yes, for anything that needs phone consultation in one of its 20 supported languages, or for national-level visa questions MY SEOUL+ can’t resolve. Keep the number saved.
What languages does MY SEOUL+ support?
Korean, English, Chinese, and Vietnamese natively, with machine translation covering dozens more languages for the rest of the site.
My verdict, for what it’s worth from someone who’s done this routing manually for coworkers more times than I can count: bookmark it, use it for the browsing and the booking, and don’t delete 1345 from your contacts. I’ll believe the “no more scattered info” claim once I’ve watched someone actually resolve something real on it start to finish — the same way I believed the Mobile Residence Card pitch right up until I watched a coworker fight it for an hour. That coworker, incidentally, is exactly the kind of person MY SEOUL+ is aimed at. I’m curious whether the next paperwork problem he brings to my desk is one this site actually solves, or one more login to add to the pile.