Lawmakers' Average Net Worth ₩3.52 Billion — The Party Gap Behind the Average

‘National Assembly members’ average net worth: ₩3.5 billion’ — it is the headline that surfaces around this time every year. The number is correct, but it is not enough on its own. In 2025 the average across 282 members was ₩3.52 billion, and split by party the People Power Party came in at more than double the Democratic Party. One ₩125.7 billion filer had a large effect on that average. Even after removing that person, however, the gap does not disappear. The average needs to be read together with what it shows, and what it leaves out.

What financial disclosure reveals, and what it hides

Public officials’ financial disclosure was introduced by the 1993 revision of the Public Service Ethics Act. Senior officials and members of the National Assembly must disclose their own and their immediate family’s assets in the official gazette every year. Sum up assets such as real estate, deposits, securities, bonds, and cars, then subtract liabilities, and you get a person’s net worth. It is, in effect, the only official window through which an outsider can look into each member’s finances.

The trouble is that the figures passing through that window are almost always summarized in a single line: the average. Because the average adds up every value and divides by the headcount, just one giant value at one end lifts the whole number. In a distribution with a long tail on one side — as wealth is — the average is affected more by the person at the very end than by the ‘middle person.’ That is why the same data paints an entirely different picture depending on whether you read it by average or by median.

Split by party, it more than doubles

The People Power Party’s average of ₩5.97 billion is 2.78 times the Democratic Party’s (₩2.15 billion). The Rebuilding Korea Party (₩2.12 billion) is close to the Democrats, while the Progressive Party (₩0.40 billion) and Others · Independents (₩0.67 billion) sit far below. From the table alone the conclusion seems simple — that conservative members are two or three times wealthier. But the average alone cannot explain the difference well enough. First, we need to separate out the value that lifted it.

The trap of the average — an illusion made by one person

What pulled the People Power Party’s average up this high is, in effect, a single top filer. His reported net worth was ₩125.7 billion, more than double that of the runner-up (₩54.8 billion). When 105 members share the average, this one person’s ₩125.7 billion is reflected in the average for the other 104 as well. By plain arithmetic, one person’s excess pushes the per-person average up by more than ₩1 billion. At that moment the average carries more of the influence of the wealthiest member than of an ordinary one.

This is the structural weakness of the average as a statistic. The distribution of wealth is not symmetric. The bottom is bounded near zero, but the top is open all the way into the hundreds of billions. In such a long-tailed distribution, a single extreme value can move the average sharply. That is why the ‘average wealth’ headline can feel off against intuition every year. The number reflects the very top of the distribution more than the everyday scale of the many.

So we removed him — still double

The most common rebuttal is this — “one ₩125.7 billion person merely distorted the average; remove him and there is little difference.” So we actually removed him. Excluding that one person, the People Power Party’s average drops to ₩4.82 billion, a fall of more than ₩1 billion. That drop shows how strongly the average reacted to one value. And yet the gap only shrinks from 2.78 times to 2.24 times — still more than double. Removing one person alone is not enough to erase the gap.

Even on the median, the gap survives

To read the average more carefully, switch to a yardstick less exposed to extreme values — the median. The median is the net worth of the person standing exactly in the middle when every member is lined up by wealth. Whether the ₩125.7 billion belongs to one person or two, the middle person’s seat barely moves. Seen that way, the middle person among People Power Party members holds ₩2.36 billion, the Democratic Party ₩1.56 billion — a 1.5-fold difference. It is clear the average was inflated by one person, but the gap itself remains even once the outlier is stripped away.Which means this is not a story that ends as ‘an illusion created by one person.’

Not one person, but the entire upper distribution

Why the gap survives even on the median is explained by who sits at the top. Among the top 20 by net worth, 16 are People Power Party members and only 4 are Democrats. It is not one top filer but several who fill the summit. So even when you remove the top 3 by wealth from the People Power Party average it is ₩4.01 billion, and removing the top 5 it is ₩3.48 billion. Whether you remove one or five, it sits above the Democratic Party’s average (₩2.15 billion). The gap, then, is not the problem of one person but a problem of the entire upper distribution.

That skew shows up in the type of assets too. In the financial-disclosure category data this site tallies separately, the party split diverges in the high-value districts where members’ real estate is most concentrated. Among members reporting real estate in Seocho-gu it is 21 People Power Party to 15 Democratic Party; in Gangnam-gu, 20 to 9; in Yongsan-gu, 12 to 8 — the pricier the district, the heavier the People Power Party share. It is corroborating evidence that the net-worth gap is not the fluke of any one line item, but that the very locations where assets accumulate are tinged with party color.

Why it matters — read the distribution, not the person

How you read this gap is no mere curiosity. While the single line ‘an average of ₩3.5 billion’ circulates verbatim as a headline every year, two facts are flattened at once. One is that an ordinary member’s finances sit far from that average: the overall median is ₩1.77 billion, close to half of ‘₩3.5 billion.’ To conclude from the average alone that lawmakers are all rich in the same way is to read the very top of the distribution as if it represented the whole. The other is that, even after stripping that illusion away and looking at the median, a distinct gap between the parties remains. To deny the gap itself just because the average was exaggerated is something the data likewise does not permit.

In the end, what these numbers point to is neither one individual’s wealth nor a moral verdict on a party. It is which kind of people — with which backgrounds and assets — enter the legislature under which party’s name, and how closely, or how poorly, the makeup of the representative body resembles the wealth distribution of society at large. Only when we doubt the single word ‘average’ and look inside it do the numbers finally begin to tell their real story.

Methodology & source — From the line-item data of the public officials’ financial disclosure (2025), we summed all reported assets per member and subtracted liabilities to obtain net worth. Items under disclosure refusal carry no amount and are treated as 0. The subjects are the 282 National Assembly members mapped in the member roster, with minor parties and independents grouped as ‘Others.’ Asset reports are a year-end snapshot, and real estate is based on the official assessed value, so it may differ from actual transaction prices. The per-person total net-worth figures in this article are a separate tally based on the public officials’ financial disclosure (official gazette · Public Service Ethics System), computed at a different unit from this site’s trend category tallies (by line item such as real estate or securities). The aggregation source and method also differ from the total asset figures reported in the press, so absolute values may differ. The real-estate-by-district party distribution cited in the text is contextual figures from the trend tally. Data tally · kookrator.