Kimjang Season in Korea: When It Happens, What It Costs and How Visitors Can Join

Every November, supermarket entrances in Korea fill up with stacks of napa cabbage and sacks of red pepper powder, and delivery trucks drop boxes of salted cabbage at apartment doors. Somewhere in most extended families, someone is organising a weekend. This is 김장 kimjang: making enough kimchi in one go to last through winter, and usually most of the next year.

It is also changing fast. Fewer households do it, and those that do skip the hardest step. What follows covers the timing, the cost, what the surveys say, and the realistic ways a visitor can get involved. If you just want a jar to take home, our guide to buying kimchi to take home is the shorter read.

What is kimjang, and why is it on the UNESCO list?

Kimjang is not just a recipe. It is the whole event: buying 20 or so heads of cabbage, salting them overnight, rinsing and draining, making the stuffing of radish, chilli powder, garlic, salted seafood and whatever the family insists on, then rubbing it into each leaf by hand. It takes a crowd, which is the point. Relatives, neighbours and in-laws split the labour, and everyone goes home with a share.

Since 2020, 22 November has also been 김치의 날 Kimchi Day, a legal commemorative day. The date is a pun: November stands for ingredients added one by one, and the 22nd for kimchi’s twenty-two claimed health benefits. Official kimchi events now cluster around it.

When is kimjang season, and who decides?

The weather decides. The traditional rule, as the Korea Meteorological Administration set it out in its regional kimjang-timing reports, is to make kimjang once the daily mean temperature stays at or below 4°C and the daily minimum drops below freezing. Cold enough that the kimchi ferments slowly instead of going sour in a week.

That produces a “kimjang front” that moves from north to south, like the autumn foliage front in reverse. KMA’s 2015 report gives a sense of the spread.

📅 Best kimjang dates by city, KMA regional report (2015)

Those dates have crept later as winters warm - KMA itself noted Seoul’s best date moving four days between its 1920-1950 and 1980-2010 averages. In practice, households now plan around weekends and cabbage prices more than thermometers. The Korea Rural Economic Institute (KREI) surveyed 1,000 kimchi-making or kimchi-buying households in October 2025: 73.1% planned to make theirs between mid-November and early December. The capital region and Chungcheong skewed toward mid-to-late November, the southern provinces and Jeju toward late November and early December, and almost everyone expected to be finished by mid-December.

How much does kimjang cost in 2025 and 2026?

Kimjang cost is a national news item. Each November the Korea Agro-Fisheries and Food Trade Corporation (aT) prices 14 kimjang ingredients - napa cabbage, radish, spring onion, chilli powder, garlic, salted shrimp, salt and the rest - at traditional markets and large retailers across the country. It then publishes a single figure: the cost of a 20-head kimjang for a family of four.

💰 aT kimjang cost index, 4-person household, 20 heads of cabbage (mid-November survey)

Two cautions. First, aT compares like for like by survey date, so its “vs last year” figure does not always match the previous headline: the 2025 release set 201,151 won against 213,003 won at the same point in 2024. Second, the November figure hides what happens in September. After the 2024 heatwave, aT’s average retail price for a single head of cabbage hit ₩9,963 in late September, up 61% on a year earlier - then fell to about a third of that by kimjang week as the autumn crop came in. Government discount support also pulls the November number down; the 2025 release credited “record-scale” discounts.

For 2026, no kimjang cost forecast has been published yet; KREI’s consumer survey and aT’s index normally appear in early and mid-November. KREI’s September 2026 outlook expected cabbage and radish prices to be higher than a year earlier but still below the normal-year level.

Do Koreans still make kimjang at home?

Most still do, but the share is falling and the job is getting smaller. KREI’s 2025 survey is the clearest snapshot.

The big shift is 절임배추 jeorim baechu, cabbage that arrives already salted, rinsed and drained, usually by courier in 10 kg or 20 kg boxes from growing areas. Salting was always the worst part: hauling and splitting the heads, a night of turning them in brine, then rinsing in freezing water. Buyers told KREI they chose pre-salted cabbage mainly because salting is a hassle (55.8%) and it saves time (32.5%). The stuffing is still homemade in 85.8% of cases.

Commercial kimchi, when bought, now mostly comes from online shops and TV home shopping (48.8%), not markets. So the image of the whole family squatting around red plastic tubs in the courtyard is real, but these days it is more likely to be a small team working through a delivery of pre-salted cabbage in an apartment kitchen.

What do people eat on kimjang day?

수육 suyuk, boiled pork, wrapped in the kimchi you have just made. The pork - belly or shoulder - is simmered in the afternoon while the stuffing goes on, then sliced and eaten with salted cabbage leaves, a pile of fresh stuffing and, in season, raw oysters. That combination is essentially 보쌈 bossam, and bossam’s own origin story is kimjang day. Unfermented kimchi at this point is sharp, crunchy and slightly sweet, closer to a salad, and nothing like the sour kimchi most visitors know.

How can a visitor join kimjang in Seoul?

Honestly: you cannot drop in on a family kimjang, and the one big public event visitors used to join no longer runs. The Seoul Kimjang Culture Festival filled Seoul Plaza every November from 2014; its 2019 edition salted 50 tonnes of cabbage and had a dedicated kitchen for foreign visitors. It has not been held since 2020. Several English-language blogs still list it with future dates, so ignore those.

What does exist:

📍 Museum Kimchikan 📍 aT Center, Yangjae

🧤 Ways to experience kimjang as a visitor (checked online, September 2026)

A few notes on each. The Bukchon classes are the practical choice for most visitors: they are small, run in several languages, and you leave with 700-900 g of kimchi that you made yourself. Our comparison of Seoul cooking classes prices this and others per hour. Museum Kimchikan is worth an hour on its own even without a class; its online exhibition includes a kimjang guide, and it sits in the middle of the Insadong walk covered in our Insadong guide.

Kimjang sharing drives are the closest thing to the real event. Every late autumn, district offices, the Red Cross, churches, companies and universities make hundreds of kilos of kimchi for low-income households, and they need hands. They are organised in Korean, often through the national 1365 volunteer portal, and suit longer-stay visitors, students and residents better than someone in town for four days.

Can you take kimjang kimchi home on the plane?

Usually, with limits. Kimchi counts as a liquid or gel in cabin baggage, so a class batch has to go in checked luggage, sealed and double-bagged. Fresh kimchi is also still fermenting, and gas builds up in the bag during the flight. Whether your home country lets it in is a separate question - rules differ, and some restrict fish-sauce or meat-based ingredients. We cover packing in buying kimchi to take home and the country-by-country rules in taking Korean food home through customs.

Kimjang is the moment the Korean kitchen switches to winter. For the rest of the season’s food, see Korea’s winter seasonal foods and winter street snacks. For how kimchi fits into an ordinary meal, see what Koreans actually eat at home. And if you are coming earlier in the autumn, Chuseok’s seasonal food comes first.