Convenience Store Medicine in Korea: Thirteen Boxes, One of Each

Thirteen. That is the whole list — every medicine a Korean convenience store is permitted to sell you. The scheme has been running since 15 November 2012, and the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s table still totals thirteen products, under four headings.

It is an odd thing to find reassuring at two in the morning. But the Ministry of Health and Welfare put the reason for the scheme in the first line of its own policy page, and the reason is precisely the situation you are in: relieving the difficulty of buying medicine on public holidays and in the small hours, when pharmacies are shut. Korea’s pharmacies are excellent, dense, and closed. Rather than force them open, the state handed a very short list to the shops that never close.

Which turns a medical problem into a reading problem. Three questions, all answered in Hangul: is this shop allowed to sell it, which of the four words do I want, and how much of it can I take to the till.

Not every convenience store is one

A shop that wants to sell these registers with the 보건소 (bo-geon-so), the public health centre of its district, and it must meet four conditions. One of them settles the question for you before you walk in: the premises must be open 24 hours, all year, with no closing days. A branch that pulls its shutter at eleven cannot be registered at all.

The other three are quieter. It has to be a retail business; whoever sells has to have completed four hours of training beforehand; and the till has to be able to block a recalled medicine by international barcode. Four hours is four hours — the person at the counter is trained to run the transaction, not to advise you on it.

What you look for on the wall is 등록증 (deung-nok-jeung), the registration certificate. It is there because the law says it must be: displaying it in the shop is one of seven listed obligations, sitting alongside the duty to post the cautions for use somewhere a buyer can easily see them. A shop with neither of those on show is very likely not registered, and no amount of asking will produce a box from the back.

There is a national register of every licensed seller. It will not help you. The open-data portal publishes it as a downloadable file of 84,631 rows, rebuilt from every district’s licensing records and, it says, refreshed daily to a state two days old. That is a permit ledger, not a directory: one of its columns is business status, so shops that have closed or suspended are sitting in there too, and nobody has turned any of it into something you can consult on a phone at two in the morning. The certificate on the wall is the lookup.

Four words, and the shelf sorts itself

Two suffixes do all the work, and you have met one of them already. -제 (-je) is the Sino-Korean ending for a prepared agent; 약 (yak) is the plain everyday word for medicine — the same 약 that opens 약국 (yak-guk), the pharmacy sign we took apart in part three. Both mean “medicine.” Korean simply uses the formal one in compounds and the ordinary one on its own.

So the headings read themselves once they are split:

The shelf says	Say it	Literally
해열진통제	hae-yeol-jin-tong-je	fever-down + pain-still + agent
소화제	so-hwa-je	digestion + agent
감기약	gam-gi-yak	a cold + medicine
파스	pa-seu	a loanword — the adhesive medicated patch

The scheme’s own name works the same way. 안전상비의약품 (an-jeon-sang-bi-ui-yak-pum) is 안전 safe, 상비 kept permanently ready, 의약품 pharmaceuticals. Seven syllables that say “the safe medicines you keep in the house,” which is exactly what the list is.

The thirteen

Pack sizes are not the shop’s choice. Each product is designated together with the unit it may be sold in, and the units are small on purpose — 정 (jeong) is a tablet, 매 (mae) a sheet of patches.

Heading	The box says	Say it	Pack
해열진통제	타이레놀정 500밀리그람	ta-i-re-nol-jeong	8 tablets
	타이레놀정 160밀리그람	ta-i-re-nol-jeong	8 tablets
	어린이용 타이레놀정 80밀리그람	eo-ri-ni-yong ta-i-re-nol-jeong	10 tablets
	어린이타이레놀현탁액	eo-ri-ni ta-i-re-nol hyeon-tak-aek	100 ml
	어린이부루펜시럽	eo-ri-ni bu-ru-pen si-reop	80 ml
소화제	베아제정	be-a-je-jeong	3 tablets
	닥터베아제정	dak-teo-be-a-je-jeong	3 tablets
	훼스탈골드정	hwe-seu-tal-gol-deu-jeong	6 tablets
	훼스탈플러스정	hwe-seu-tal-peul-leo-seu-jeong	6 tablets
감기약	판콜에이내복액	pan-kol-e-i nae-bok-aek	30 ml × 3 bottles
	판피린티정	pan-pi-rin-ti-jeong	3 tablets
파스	신신파스아렉스	sin-sin-pa-seu-a-rek-seu	4 sheets
	제일쿨파프	je-il-kul-pa-peu	4 sheets

어린이 (eo-ri-ni) means child, 현탁액 (hyeon-tak-aek) a suspension and 시럽 (si-reop) a syrup, so the two children’s liquids and the small children’s tablet announce themselves on the box. If you need to know what is actually inside a box, that is a question for the national drug database or a pharmacist — the ministry’s list names products, not ingredients, and so do we.

One box of each, sealed, and not to anyone small

Three of the seller’s obligations decide what actually happens at the till, and none of them is negotiable by asking nicely.

One package unit per sale, per medicine. The limit is per product, not per basket — a box of 소화제 and a box of 감기약 in the same purchase is fine, two boxes of the same thing is not. The 8-tablet pack is the pack.

No opening the packaging to sell part of it. You cannot buy three tablets out of a box of eight, and the shop cannot offer to.

Nothing may be sold to a child under twelve — and the rule expressly extends to any primary-school pupil, which also catches the twelve-year-olds still in school. Read that against the list above and you get the sharpest line in the whole scheme: three of the thirteen products are labelled 어린이, for children, and a child may not buy any of them. The list assumes an adult walks in on the child’s behalf. If you are travelling with a child who is unwell, you are the one who goes to the shop.

One more thing the sources say that the internet mostly does not. English write-ups tend to tell you this stock lives behind the counter. The ministry’s rule points the other way:

일반공산품·식품 등과 구분하여 소비자가 선택하도록 별도 진열

Displayed separately from ordinary manufactured goods and food, so that the consumer selects it.

Ministry of Health and Welfare, ‘Sale of safety-standard household medicines outside pharmacies’ 보건복지부 「안전상비의약품 약국외 판매제도」 31 March 2026

A separate stand you pick from yourself, in other words. We have not surveyed how individual shops arrange it, and a small branch may well keep the stand near the till — but if you are scanning for a locked cabinet or waiting to be served, you may be looking in the wrong place.

Where the list stops

The statute does not cap the scheme at thirteen. It caps it at twenty, and the ministry says so on the same screen where its table totals thirteen:

성분, 부작용, 함량, 제형, 인지도, 구매의 편의성 등을 고려하여 20개 품목 이내로 보건복지부장관이 지정

Designated by the Minister of Health and Welfare, within 20 items, considering ingredients, side effects, strength, formulation, familiarity and convenience of purchase.

Ministry of Health and Welfare, ‘Sale of safety-standard household medicines outside pharmacies’ 보건복지부 「안전상비의약품 약국외 판매제도」 31 March 2026

Seven slots the statute allows and the table does not use, printed a few centimetres apart on one government page. We are not predicting anything about them: we found no ministry document announcing a change, and the designation notice itself still lists thirteen. We point at the gap because it is the reason to check the date at the top of this page before you trust the table — a list with room to grow is a list that can be revised without telling you.

When the four headings are not enough, the answer is a pharmacy, and the government points at two tools for finding one that is open: the emergency medical portal E-Gen, which lists pharmacies alongside hospitals, and 휴일지킴이약국 at pharm114.or.kr, the roster of pharmacies on duty on holidays and late evenings. Both are named on the legislation ministry’s own guidance page. And the line that has not changed since our article on seeing a doctor here: a cold is not what an emergency room is for, and without Korean insurance the emergency room is where a bad night gets expensive.

What this article does not claim

The thirteen products, their pack sizes, the four registration conditions and the seller’s obligations are read from the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s policy page and the Ministry of Government Legislation’s plain-language guide, both opened on 3 September 2026. We have not checked any individual shop: whether the branch on your corner is registered, what it charges, or where it puts the stand are things only the certificate on that wall can tell you. We did not open the two pharmacy-finding sites, and describe them only as the legislation ministry does. Nothing here is medical advice — we are not doctors, and this is a reading lesson for a shelf. What is inside each box is a question for a pharmacist, which the person at the till is not.

Related

• Korean clinic and pharmacy signs — the 약 in 약국, and the door to use when the shelf is not enough
• Seeing a doctor in Korea — walk-in, no appointment, and what it costs uninsured
• Korean shop door signs — 준비중, 휴무, and why a lit shop can still be shut
• Korean numbers — for reading 8정 and 4매 out loud