Long-term repair reserve
lastmod 2025-07-05created 2025-07-053 edits
A special management fee collected once a month to cover the cost of repairing, replacing, landscaping, painting, etc. the main facilities of an apartment complex, and of replacing and repairing major facilities such as auxiliary and welfare facilities, according to the long-term repair plan (Article 30 of the Multi-Family Housing Management Act).
Multi-family housing that falls under any one of the following must collect and accumulate the long-term repair reserve every month: 300 or more households, elevators installed, or central or district heating.
About
Among the items in the monthly apartment management fee, the ‘long-term repair reserve’ is one you have probably wondered about at least once: ‘What is this?’ According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport's Multi-Family Housing Management Information System, as of July 2017 the national average long-term repair reserve for apartments was 143 won per ㎡ per month.
The long-term repair reserve is a special management fee collected once a month to cover the cost of repairing, replacing, landscaping, painting, etc. the main facilities of an apartment complex, and of replacing and repairing major facilities such as auxiliary and welfare facilities, according to the long-term repair plan (Article 30 of the Multi-Family Housing Management Act). Multi-family housing that falls under any one of the following must collect and accumulate the long-term repair reserve every month: 300 or more households, elevators installed, or central or district heating.
In practice, the management office, which is the managing entity of the multi-family housing, customarily includes the long-term repair reserve in the monthly management fee. As a result, when the owner and the occupant of an apartment are different people, the occupant often ends up paying the long-term repair reserve as well, and this has led to many disputes between landlords and tenants.
To resolve such disputes between landlords and tenants over the long-term repair reserve, Article 30(1) of the Multi-Family Housing Management Act provides that “the managing entity shall collect from the owner of the housing and accumulate the long-term repair reserve required for replacing and repairing the main facilities of the multi-family housing according to the long-term repair plan.” Article 31(7) of its Enforcement Decree provides that “if the user has paid the long-term repair reserve on the owner's behalf, the owner of the multi-family housing shall return that amount,” and paragraph 8 states that “if the user of the multi-family housing requests confirmation of payment of the long-term repair reserve, the managing entity shall issue a certificate without delay.”
In the case above, the apartment long-term repair reserve that tenant A has been paying should originally have been paid by B, the landlord. Therefore, when A's lease ends and A moves out, A can get a certificate of payment of the apartment long-term repair reserve from the management office, claim it from B, the landlord, and have the long-term repair reserve returned.