Importing Your Pet to South Korea

Here’s the detail most owners researching this route get wrong: Korea does not hold every arriving pet in quarantine. APQA (the Animal and Plant Quarantine Agency) releases a compliant dog or cat the same day, after a document check and a clinical exam at Incheon. The 10-day figure that circulates online is what APQA itself calls the average extended hold, and it only applies when something in the paperwork is missing or the titre result doesn’t stack up.

The other detail worth knowing early: once your pet’s rabies titre result is in hand, there’s no fixed waiting period before travel. That’s a real point of difference from the EU’s 90-day rule or Japan’s 180-day rule for pets arriving from unlisted countries, and it’s the main reason a South Korea move can run faster than either of those, provided the titre test itself is booked in good time.

What actually triggers quarantine, and what doesn't

A pet under 90 days old faces no rabies vaccination or titre requirement at all beyond the microchip. From 90 days, if the pet is arriving from a country Korea doesn’t classify as rabies-free (which covers the UK, US and the rest of Europe), a titre test becomes mandatory: blood drawn at any point in the 24 months before arrival, tested to at least 0.5 IU/ml.

Get the documents right and the pet clears APQA’s desk on arrival day. Get something wrong, whether that’s a missing certificate, an out-of-range titre, or a chip that won’t scan, and the pet goes into quarantine at the owner’s cost, averaging 10 days by APQA’s own count but open-ended if the underlying problem takes longer to resolve. The practical lesson: the preparation work happens before departure, not after.

Health certificate and the 10-or-more rule

The health certificate has to come from an official source in the country of departure and needs to record the microchip number, date of birth, and, where the titre test applies, that result. APQA checks the original against the pet in front of them at Incheon, so any mismatch between chip number and certificate is exactly the kind of thing that turns a same-day release into an extended one.

Almost nobody moving a single pet needs to think about import permits: Korea only requires advance notification and pre-approved quarantine facility space for travellers bringing 10 or more cats and dogs in one move, a rule aimed at breeders and rescue transports rather than a family relocating with the family dog.