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Watching the Koreans

What Koreans Say Is the "Right" New Year's Gift Amount (Sebaetdon) Isn't What the Payment Data Shows

In short

Survey respondents overwhelmingly say 50,000 won is the appropriate New Year's cash gift for a teenager. Real mobile payment data from the same period shows 100,000 won has already overtaken it as the more common actual amount — a genuine gap between what people say the norm is and what they actually do.

In this article

1. Two numbers that don't match
2. What the actual transaction data shows
3. A headline that says the quiet part out loud
4. Why the survey and the data disagree
5. The broader lesson about "unwritten rules"

Ask a large sample of Korean adults what a fair

sebaetdon

sebaetdon (세뱃돈) — cash traditionally given to children and younger relatives during Lunar New Year, after they perform a formal bow to elders.

amount for a middle or high schooler is, and one large survey of 78,000 respondents found 65 percent saying 50,000 won was the appropriate figure. Look at what people are actually sending through mobile payment apps over the same holiday period, and a very different number is winning.

Two numbers that don't match

That mismatch is the interesting part. It isn't that the survey is wrong and the payment data is right, or vice versa — both are accurately measuring something real. They're just measuring two different things: what people believe the socially correct answer is when asked directly, versus what the same population actually does once no one's watching them fill out a form.

It's worth being clear about why this particular gap is unusually easy to catch, when it's normally quite hard to prove. Most social norms live and die in private, one-on-one exchanges with no third-party record of what actually happened — there's no dataset tracking what people privately told a friend a fair gift would be versus what they actually handed over at dinner. Sebaetdon is a rare case where a huge share of the actual transactions now happen through trackable mobile payment apps, leaving a real paper trail behind the private decision, right alongside a large public survey asking the same population what they believe the norm to be. That combination is what makes the gap measurable instead of just suspected.

What the actual transaction data shows

KakaoPay transaction data from a recent Lunar New Year holiday found that the average sebaetdon received by middle and high school students came to 74,000 won — up roughly 1.4 times from 54,000 won recorded in 2021. More specifically, the balance of round-number gift amounts has visibly tipped: as recently as the prior year, 50,000 won (39 percent of gifts) still narrowly led 100,000 won (37 percent). In the most recent data, that flipped — 100,000 won (42 percent) has overtaken 50,000 won (37 percent) as the more commonly given amount.

A headline that says the quiet part out loud

Korean media coverage of the shift has been refreshingly direct about the social pressure underneath it. One report on the trend was headlined, in essence, "is it awkward to give grandchildren just 50,000 won?" — treating the anxiety itself as the story, not just the raw number. That's a notably candid way of putting words to something usually left unspoken: relatives aren't just calculating what feels generous. They're calculating what will read as stingy compared to what everyone else in the family is quietly giving.

That anxiety has a very specific, very ordinary trigger: children compare notes with each other. A grandparent giving 50,000 won to a grandchild who mentions, days later, that a cousin received 100,000 won from someone else in the family isn't dealing with an abstract social statistic — they're dealing with a very concrete, very personal sense of having been outdone in front of their own grandchild. That's a far more immediate and uncomfortable pressure than any survey question captures, and it's a much better explanation for why real behavior would drift upward faster than stated norms ever would.

Nobody wants to be quoted saying more than 50,000 won is necessary. Plenty of people are quietly sending 100,000 anyway.

Why the survey and the data disagree

The gap makes sense once you consider what each measurement actually captures. A survey question invites a normative answer — what someone believes is reasonable, prudent, or defensible if asked to justify it to a stranger conducting research. A real gift, sent to an actual niece or grandchild during an actual family gathering, is answering a completely different question: what won't embarrass me in front of family who may compare notes, and what keeps pace with whatever the child's other relatives are likely giving. Those two questions have no particular reason to produce the same number, and in this case, they clearly haven't.

There's likely also a simple social-desirability effect at work in the survey responses themselves. Naming a smaller, more modest figure to a researcher signals thrift and a lack of materialism about family relationships — a flattering self-image to project, even anonymously. Naming the actual, higher figure risks sounding like someone who's caved to consumerist pressure or is simply showing off. Given that choice, it's not surprising that stated preferences skew lower than revealed behavior — the survey answer is partly a statement about how the respondent wants to be seen, not purely a report of what they actually do.

This is really a specific, well-measured instance of the same broader force covered elsewhere on this site regarding wedding gift money: an unwritten social "rule" isn't a fixed number handed down from tradition so much as an ongoing average of what people are currently, privately doing — one that a stated-preference survey can lag behind by a meaningful margin, precisely because admitting to the newer, more expensive real number doesn't feel as virtuous as citing the older, more modest one.

The broader lesson about "unwritten rules"

There's also a broader financial backdrop worth noting: separate research on holiday spending found consumers budgeting an average of roughly 712,000 won in total spending for a single Chuseok holiday period, and adult children giving their own parents an average of around 227,000 won in holiday money — figures that make clear sebaetdon isn't an isolated line item but one piece of a genuinely large seasonal financial obligation running through Korean holidays twice a year.

The practical lesson, for anyone trying to gauge an actual Korean social norm rather than the polite public version of it, is to be skeptical of survey-stated figures for exactly this kind of socially visible spending. What people say the "right" amount is tends to reflect where they'd like the norm to be, or where they'd feel comfortable being quoted. What real payment data shows tends to reflect where the norm has actually already moved — quietly, well ahead of anyone officially updating the number out loud.

That gap is also a useful caution for reading any single statistic about Korean social customs at face value, including the ones on this site. A number reported from a survey and a number reported from real transactions can both be accurate and still describe two different realities — the one people are willing to admit to, and the one actually moving money between hands every holiday season.

This isn't the only Korean gift-giving norm where stated preference lags real behavior — the same say-do gap shows up in Korea's wedding cash-gift standard, and the underlying compression logic matches how everyday gifticon giving has quietly scaled down.