Note №7CONSUMER PROTECTION
1 primary source checked1 reported, unconfirmedReviewed 13 Aug 2026
Prepaid treatment packages are standard at Korean skin and cosmetic clinics — pay upfront for a bundle of sessions, often at a discount. Until recently, the fine print attached to many of those packages meant that if you changed your mind partway through, you could lose the entire remaining balance.
On 16 July 2026, Korea’s Fair Trade Commission published the result of a review into prepaid-treatment contracts at 15 dermatology and cosmetic surgery clinics. All 15 agreed to rewrite the terms themselves. The commission did not issue an order, and it did not change any law. What it did was audit fifteen contracts and get them fixed.
Before going further, the limit of this news: it covered fifteen named clinics. If the clinic you are booking is not one of them, nothing about your contract changed in July. The 10 percent figure everyone quoted comes from Korea’s Consumer Dispute Resolution Standards, which guide how disputes are settled rather than binding every clinic in advance. The commission has said it is considering a standard contract for the sector. It has not issued one yet.
What the clinics’ contracts used to say
Following a review covering 2023 and 2024, the FTC identified six categories of contract terms it classified as unfair under the Act on the Regulation of Terms and Conditions. Among them: dissatisfaction with treatment results wasn’t accepted as grounds for a refund, refunds were denied once a certain time period had passed, refunds were denied if a package’s stated validity period had expired, promotional or event-priced packages were excluded from refunds entirely, patients weren’t allowed to transfer or resell unused prepaid treatment credits to someone else, and if the specific doctor named in the contract left the clinic, patients had no refund right — regardless of whether they wanted to continue with a replacement doctor.
Under those terms, a clinic could functionally keep some or all of a prepayment even when a patient had done nothing wrong and simply wanted to stop.
What changed, and for whom
The 15 clinics revised their standard contracts so that a simple change of mind is now valid grounds for canceling a prepaid package. On cancellation, the clinic settles the cost of treatments already received, deducts a penalty of up to 10 percent under Korea’s standard consumer dispute resolution criteria, and refunds the remainder. That 10 percent figure replaces penalty clauses that had run as high as 20 to 30 percent in the contracts the FTC reviewed. The revisions also removed clauses barring patients from transferring unused treatment credit to a third party, waiving the clinic’s civil and criminal liability, and prohibiting patients from filing complaints or lawsuits. Those clinics are now required to offer a refund, or a mutually agreed replacement provider, if the doctor named in the original contract leaves.
All of that applies to the fifteen contracts the commission looked at. It is not a rule the rest of the industry has been made to follow.
What this means if you’re prepaying for a package now
Assume your clinic’s contract still says whatever it says. Read the cancellation clause before you prepay for any multi-session package, and get it in writing.
If that clause describes a penalty higher than 10 percent for a simple change of mind, or denies refunds outright for reasons like a doctor leaving or a promotional price, it is out of step with what Korea’s competition regulator has already identified as unfair in fifteen comparable clinics. That is not a ruling that binds your clinic. It is leverage: you can point at it, by name and date, and ask why your contract still says something the regulator has already had fifteen clinics remove.
Source: Korea Fair Trade Commission press release, “15개 의원의 선납진료 이용약관 상 불공정 약관 시정” (Correction of unfair terms in the prepaid-treatment contracts of 15 clinics), 16 July 2026, Terms and Special Transactions Division — read in the original, 13 August 2026. This article does not identify the specific clinics involved.
Correction, 13 August 2026: An earlier version of this article said the Fair Trade Commission had ordered the clinics to rewrite their terms, and its headline implied the 10 percent cap now applies to Korean clinics generally. Both overstated the action. The fifteen clinics corrected their contracts voluntarily, and the change binds only them. We have rewritten the headline and the affected passages against the commission’s own release of 16 July 2026.
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