From trainee to debut: who pays, who decides

Picture a practice room at ten at night. The floor is scuffed in the same three places, the mirror has a smear at head height, and someone has left a towel over the speaker. The people who use this room are mostly teenagers, and on paper they are nobody's employees. They are 연습생 (yeonseupsaeng), trainees: taught everything, paid nothing, on the promise that one day a company will put them on a stage.

We, the haeyo teachers, are asked about this path by learners more than almost any other part of K-pop. A few want to try it. Most want to understand it, because it explains why idols sign, perform and sometimes leave the way they do. This article follows the path in order, with the numbers we could source before 30 June 2026 and a plain label where we could not.

Four ways in

The usual list is short, and it is a pattern we have summarised from general reporting. We found no single official page that sets out the routes, so please read it as a pattern, not a rule.

Audition dates change every year and differ by company. We did not find a reliable calendar and we will not invent one. Each company posts its own schedule on its official recruitment page, and that is the only place to check.

Who is in training, and who leaves

The best public numbers come from a 2025 survey by the Korea Creative Content Agency, reported by the Hankook Ilbo on 29 November 2025. The number of trainees registered with agencies fell from 1,895 in 2020 to 1,170 in 2022, a drop of 38.3 percent. The article gives a voluntary-exit figure of 34.4 percent, up 3.4 percentage points, and says the main reason for the decline was the cost of training for companies.

Look at what these numbers cover. The survey counts registered trainees only, meaning those a company has reported. It says nothing about hobbyists in academies, and its figures stop in 2022. We found no 2024 or 2025 headcount, so we cannot say whether the fall has continued.

What a month looks like

This is a general description, with no source behind it. Training is lessons: vocals and dance for everyone, rap or composing for some, language classes for those who will work abroad and, for the younger ones, school alongside. Most companies are said to grade progress at the end of every month in an assessment called 월말평가 (wolmal pyeongga), and the results decide who moves up, who stays and who is told to go.

Accounts of how those months feel, such as phone limits and cameras in practice rooms, were mostly published after 30 June 2026. We do not quote them. We would rather give you less than give you a story we cannot date.

The training is free to the trainee. The bill does not disappear. It waits.

Seven years: where the number comes from

Everyone who follows K-pop has heard of the seven-year contract. It is not in a statute. It comes from the Fair Trade Commission's standard terms for entertainment contracts, issued in 2009. As the Kyunghyang Shinmun reported on 7 July 2009, an actor cannot be bound to an exclusive contract of more than seven years. For singers the terms set no maximum, but after seven years a singer can give notice, and the contract ends six months later.

That is where the 'seven-year curse' (7년 징크스) comes from. It is a folk saying that groups tend to renegotiate or split around that point. It is a saying, not a statistic, and we did not find a count.

In June 2024 newspapers reported a proposal to ban any first contract longer than seven years and to require written agreement for extensions.

Who pays, and how the debt is settled

For trainees, the more recent rule is the revised standard trainee contract of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, with its addendum for young trainees, in force from 1 January 2026. The Hankyung reported it on 31 December 2025. Two changes are clear. The contract now names acts that harm a trainee's schooling, such as pressing a child to miss lessons or to drop out. And the deadline for paying damages or penalty fees must be written into the contract, for example a set number of days after the event.

The money is the less certain part. Some reports say that the company carries training costs as a rule, that those costs may be deducted from earnings once an exclusive contract starts, and that a penalty for breach is capped at half of the direct training costs. We could not check these claims against the notice itself.

How big is the bill? There is no official figure per trainee. One newspaper took JYP's 2024 spending on developing new artists, 1.1243 billion won, and divided it among an assumed 30 trainees. That gives about 3.12 million won per trainee per month. With 20 trainees it would be about 4.7 million. The reporter chose the headcount, so this is an illustration, not a measurement.

What debut costs

There is no official statistic, and the press estimates do not agree. The table sets them side by side, with the caveat each one needs.

So the honest range from our reading is 'between about 100 million won and a billion or more', depending on the year, the size of the company and what is counted.

Survival shows, and what went wrong in 2019

Survival shows promise a shortcut, because the public decides. The weak point is that the public's decision has to be honest. In 2019 viewers analysed the final vote counts of Produce X 101 and noticed that the totals for the top twenty places looked like multiples of one figure. The suspicion led to a criminal investigation.

Producer Ahn Joon-young was sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to forfeit about 37 million won, and the Supreme Court made that final (case 2020do17078). The chief producer, Kim Yong-bum, received one year and eight months and was released in July 2021. A list of trainees harmed across seasons one to four was made public at the appeal stage. We did not find the date of the Supreme Court ruling.

For a reader weighing this route, the lesson is plain: a show is a company with a vote on top, and that vote has been faked before. Our year-end awards article uses the same case.

The welfare debate, to June 2026

By the end of June 2026 the debate had four live strands. They are very different in how firm they are, so we have separated them.

What the debate is not: we found nothing citable, before 30 June 2026, that says the training system has been repaired. A standard contract is a model form, not a law, and we found no count of companies that have adopted the new one. The fall in trainee numbers and the 34.4 percent who leave on their own are the figures that keep the argument alive.

If you are a foreign applicant

Open auditions accept applications from abroad in many cases, though each company sets its own rules. Our advice is the boring kind. Read the contract with someone who reads Korean and, if you can, a lawyer. Ask who pays for lodging, lessons and travel, and what is deducted later. Keep your own copies of everything. Keep studying, because the first document you sign will be in Korean.

The right to stay in Korea and to train there is a visa question, not an audition question. Start with our visa article, and with the work article if you plan to study as well.

• Visas in plain words
• Working while you study
• The year-end awards calendar
• The honest notes

Try Level 3AContracts are written in conditions: if you pass, if the company pays, you must sign by. Level 3A teaches the conditional forms -(으)면 and -아야/어야 so that you can read them yourself.