Korea Official Statistics (KOSIS) — English-normalized time series

Pull any table from KOSIS (Statistics Korea's official portal) — no Korean account needed — and get analysis-ready rows: English labels, ISO periods (2024-08, 2024-Q3, 2024-H2), numeric values with thousand separators removed, explicit value_status (ok / missing / unparseable — missing is never turned into 0), and a per-row attribution block.

Typical searches this actor answers: South Korea CPI / inflation data · Korean unemployment rate · Korea population by region · Korean births and deaths statistics · Korea population projections · KOSIS API in English.

Use cases

• Inflation & prices — monthly Consumer Price Index (2020=100) and CPI by item (food, energy, services) for macro models, dashboards and pricing analysis.
• Labour market — employment, unemployment rate and economically active population by sex.
• Population & demographics — resident population by city / county / district; births, deaths, marriages and divorces by region; population projections by age.
• Any official Korean table — paste the orgId / tblId from a kosis.kr URL and get the same clean English schema.
• AI agents & research assistants — every row carries its source, table and retrieval date, so an answer can cite it.

Quick start — verified tables

Copy a row into the input (all checked against live KOSIS on 2026-10-10):

Any other table: open it on kosis.kr — the address bar shows orgId=…&tblId=…. You do not need to know how many classification levels a table has: leave classL2/classL3 empty and the actor detects the depth itself.

from apify_client import ApifyClient
import pandas as pd

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("kdata-hub/kosis-korea-stats").call(run_input={
    "orgId": "101", "tblId": "DT_1J22003", "periodType": "M",
    "startPeriod": "202401", "endPeriod": "202608", "itemId": "T", "classL1": "T10"})
df = pd.DataFrame(client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items())
print(df[["period", "value", "unit_en", "item_name_en"]])

Use it from an AI agent (MCP)

Apify's MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com) lets MCP clients such as Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor or VS Code call public Store actors. Add the server to your client, then ask, for example:

Use the Apify actor kdata-hub/kosis-korea-stats to get South Korea's monthly CPI (orgId 101, tblId DT_1J22003, periodType M) from 2024-01 to 2026-08, then chart the year-over-year change.

Rows come back in English with an attribution block, so the answer can cite KOSIS directly.

Input

Output row

table_id, table_name_ko, category_code, category_name_en/ko, extra_categories[], item_id, item_name_en/ko, unit_en/ko, frequency, period, period_status, period_raw, value, value_status, value_raw, english_complete, attribution{…}

extra_categories carries the 2nd..8th classification of multi-dimensional tables (e.g. region × kind, sex × age) as {level, code, dimension_en/ko, name_en/ko} — so every row stays uniquely identifiable. english_complete is false when KOSIS has no English label for any of them (some tables have no English unit).

Errors you may see

Terms

KOSIS allows commercial use of its statistics with attribution, but forbids reselling them without processing (https://kosis.kr/serviceInfo/useGuide.do). This actor transforms every row into a new schema and attaches the source, organization, table, last-changed date, retrieval date and URL (KOSIS terms, Art. 7) — keep the attribution field when you republish. International and North-Korea statistics are non-commercial only; tables whose name marks them as such are refused (name-based check — verify your table if unsure).

Your API key

KOSIS terms allow commercial use (Art. 8) and forbid transferring an API key (Art. 5). The actor's built-in key stays a secret environment variable and is never exposed to users; you may also supply your own key.

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.002 per dataset row ($2 per 1,000 rows). Example: 8 months of the national CPI = 8 rows = $0.016.

FAQ

Do I need a Korean account or a KOSIS API key? No. The actor uses built-in access by default; you can supply your own free key in apiKey.

What does it cost? $0.002 per output row. A run that returns no rows produces no result charges.

Is the data official? Yes — every value comes from KOSIS, Statistics Korea's official statistics portal, with the table id and last-changed date in attribution.

How fresh is it? Each run queries KOSIS live; the latest period available depends on the agency's release schedule for that table.

Example Output (Live 2026 Data)

Here are actual rows fetched by this actor. The actor automatically maps Korean labels to English, making the data instantly ready for Pandas or SQL.

Economically Active Population (August 2026)

[
  {
    "category_name_en": "Total",
    "item_name_en": "Population 15 years old and over",
    "value": 46035.6,
    "unit_en": "Thousand Person"
  },
  {
    "category_name_en": "Total",
    "item_name_en": "Economically active population",
    "value": 29739.1,
    "unit_en": "Thousand Person"
  },
  {
    "category_name_en": "Total",
    "item_name_en": "Unemployment rate",
    "value": 2.0,
    "unit_en": "%"
  }
]