The nursing school enrollment quota for the 2026 school year has been decided to remain unchanged at 24,883.
On Thursday, the Ministry of Health and Welfare announced that, after discussions with the Nursing Workforce Special Committee, it would keep the number of nursing school students for the 2026 academic year the same as the 24,883 for the 2025 academic year.
The decision was made after two rounds of discussions at the committee, which was attended by various related organizations, including the Korean Nursing Association, the Korea Hospital Association, the Korea Alliance of Patient Organizations, consumer groups, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, and the Ministry of Education.
According to the ministry, there were about 527,000 nursing license holders last year, and 282,000 worked at medical institutions, accounting for 53.7 percent of the total. In 2020, the overall activity rate of nurses, including those working in various health organizations, government employee nurses, fire brigade nurses, and long-term care facilities, stood at about 73 percent.
The government has doubled the number of nursing school admissions over the past 17 years due to the shortage of nurses in the medical field, but there are still fewer clinical nurses working in medical institutions compared to other countries. The number of patients per nurse in Korea is also higher than that of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average, so the need to expand the deployment of nursing personnel in the medium to long term has been raised continuously.
However, some participants on the committee pointed out that the resignation rate of existing nurses is decreasing in line with the increase in clinical activity rate and that new nurses have been having difficulty finding employment recently due to the fall in new recruitment, especially in tertiary general hospitals, amid the protracted government-doctor conflict.
It was also suggested that the impact of the decline in recruitment in 2024 should be continuously monitored for the next few years and that the formation and operation of the “Medical Workforce Supply and Demand Estimation Committee” under discussion in the National Assembly should be reflected in deciding the number of nursing school students.
Based on these policy conditions, the Nursing Workforce Special Committee decided to maintain the number of nursing school seats at the previous year's level of 24,883 for the 2026 academic year.
“While there was consensus on the need to expand the nursing workforce in the mid- to long-term, the latest decision was based on the need to prioritize the promotion of employment expansion policies and monitoring of their effectiveness, given the deterioration of nurse recruitment conditions in the short term,” the ministry said, explaining the background for freezing the 2026 admissions.