Photo : YONHAP News
South Korea and the United States have reached an agreement on Seoul’s share of the cost of maintaining U.S. troops on the Korean Peninsula between 2026 to 2030.
According to the foreign ministry on Friday, Seoul and Washington penned the deal on Thursday in Seoul on the 12th Special Measures Agreement(SMA), which stipulates how much South Korea pays to help upkeep the 28-thousand-500 troops in U.S. Forces Korea.
The two sides agreed to mark up Seoul’s share every year but decided to lower the rate of increase.
Under the new deal, South Korea will pay roughly one-point-52 trillion won in shared defense costs in 2026, up eight-point-three percent from the previous year.
From 2027 to 2030, Seoul’s contribution will be raised by as much as the consumer price index(CPI), which is the criteria that was applied since the 2000s before the Donald Trump administration raised Seoul’s burden by an annual average of six-point-two percent from 2019 to 2025 by applying the increase in national defense costs, which is higher than the CPI.
The two sides also put back in place an upper limit regulation on Seoul’s contribution which would limit the maximum increase in such costs to five percent.
Seoul and Washington reached the latest deal in five months in an unprecedented move, after they launched negotiations early in April, or 20 months left until the expiration of the current SMA.