(Emergency Statement on the Basic Pension) Statement by the Future Generations Network of the Pension Future Forum (2026. 9. 1.)
(For immediate release
upon the government’s announcement of its overhaul plan,
September 1, 2026)
Pension Future Forum
Future Generations Network
Emergency Statement
(September 1, 2026)
The Basic Pension Overhaul:
Why Was the Most Important Reform Left Out?
Protecting 70% of older people cannot be the purpose of the Basic Pension.
What must be protected are the lives of poor older people, and the lives of the future generations who will hold that system up for decades to come.
That is why this Basic Pension reform began not with “how much more to pay” but with “to whom to pay it.”
At present the Basic Pension is paid to 70% of the older population. Even when those aged 65 and over come to make up close to 40% of the entire population, that 70% ratio will be carried along unchanged.
What is more, the eligibility threshold is far too generous: an older couple with no other property can draw the benefit even on earned income of around 8 million won a month.
Among the baby-boom generation now entering old age, a considerable number have higher incomes and greater assets than young people, yet the system lines everyone up in the same queue on the basis of age alone.
Correcting this “70% criterion,” which is out of step with reality, in order to put the pool of eligible recipients on a rational basis,
and using the savings to protect genuinely hard-pressed older people more generously — that was the starting point of this reform debate.
Yet in the government’s final plan, it is precisely this core that has vanished.
The plan has left the 70% target take-up rate untouched, raised benefits for low-income groups, eased the couples’ reduction, and newly included even some beneficiaries of the special occupational pension schemes.
As a result, next year’s budget alone rises by as much as 2.6 trillion won.
Every decision to spend more survived; only the reform that would have corrected who receives it was erased.
The Basic Pension is not paid out of an accumulated fund.
In the end it must be covered by taxes.
Young people will have to pay higher contributions to the National Pension,
and at the same time carry the cost of a Basic Pension that population aging keeps pushing up.
What angers us is not that older people are being given more.
The problem is that even though as many as 1.17 million older people have recognized income of zero,
letting even older people with recognized income of more than 2 million won a month draw similar benefits inside the same scheme, while giving everyone a little more, is what is being called reform.
They have abandoned the structural reform needed to help the poorest older people properly,
while passing on nothing but its cost to the next generation.
The National Assembly must take up again the overhaul of the eligibility criterion that was dropped from the government’s plan.
We cannot call it reform to hand tomorrow’s generation the bill for today’s votes.
And young people will remember exactly who wrote that bill.
Media contact
Pension Future Forum Future Generations Network
Chair Kim Dae-young, Certified Tax Accountant (member of the Advisory Committee to the 22nd National Assembly Special Committee on Pension Reform / 010-8753-3688)
Director of the Public Relations Office Yang Jeong-a, writer
(010-4744-2462)
