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Ask a room of young Korean men how a dating couple should split the bill, and the answer is close to unanimous. Ask the women dating them, and the answer gets more complicated. A survey released March 17, 2025 by 대학내일20대연구소 (20slab, the youth-research institute under Univ.me) found that splitting costs evenly has become the clearly preferred norm — but not the universal one, and the gap between “clearly preferred” and “universal” is where the real tension sits.
The case that bill-splitting has won
20slab surveyed 500 men and women nationwide, ages 19 to 39, who were in a relationship of at least three months and currently dating, fielding the survey Feb. 14–18, 2025 through its “Light Survey” research service. Among men, the preference was lopsided: 78.8% said they preferred a partner who “splits costs evenly,” versus 21.2% who preferred a partner who “covers everything.” Women leaned the same direction, just less sharply — 56.8% preferred the dutch-pay style, against 43.2% who preferred a partner who takes care of the bill.
The same survey found couples are spending real money to begin with: the average reported monthly date budget came out to 354,000 won. With that kind of recurring cost, according to the survey, it tracks that a clear majority of both men and women now say they’d rather split it than leave the arithmetic — and the resentment that can come with it — to one side.
The case that the old norm hasn’t fully gone
Still, 43.2% of the women surveyed said they prefer a partner who covers the bill, not a small minority. And money problems didn’t disappear just because more couples agreed to split costs in principle. Asked which areas of their relationship caused the most friction, respondents ranked “lifestyle habits” first overall at 32.2%, followed by “frequency of calls and texts” at 30.2% and “physical affection and how it’s expressed” at 28.6%. But the breakdown by age and gender mattered: for men in their 30s specifically, “financial views (saving and spending habits)” was the single most common source of conflict, at 31.2% — ahead of every other category for that group, according to 20slab’s data.
That suggests money is still a live fault line inside Korean relationships even where couples have nominally settled on splitting the bill. A preference stated on a survey and a habit that holds up over months of actual dates aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Where that leaves couples
The same survey also found that however couples in Korea are arguing over the bill, they are mostly not meeting through dating apps to begin with: blind dates set up by a friend (소개팅) remained the single most common way current couples first met, at 25.8%, ahead of meeting through school (21.4%) and the workplace (16.4%). Dating apps only became a top-three channel for people in their 30s, and even then accounted for just 10.3% to 10.5% of first meetings, per 20slab.
Taken together, the numbers point to a relationship norm that has shifted on paper faster than it’s settled in practice: most men and a smaller majority of women now say evenly split costs are the fairer, preferred default, but a sizeable minority of women still don’t, and financial friction hasn’t disappeared from the couples who say they’ve already agreed to split things evenly. Which side wins out in any given relationship, on this evidence, still depends less on a stated preference than on the two people actually negotiating it.
Sources: 대학내일20대연구소 (20slab), “2030 남녀의 연애 인식 및 행태 조사 결과 발표” [“Survey Results on Dating Perceptions and Behavior Among Men and Women in Their 20s and 30s”] (Mar. 17, 2025), based on a survey of 500 nationwide respondents ages 19–39 conducted Feb. 14–18, 2025 via 20slab’s “Light Survey” research service.
