Sunday and holiday pharmacies: how to use pharm114

What pharm114 is

Pharm114 (휴일지킴이약국, roughly ‘holiday guardian pharmacies’) is a pharmacy search service run by the Korean Pharmaceutical Association, the national association of licensed pharmacists. Korea’s official legal-information service points people to it, alongside 119, when they need a pharmacy that is on duty on a public holiday.

Each pharmacy entry carries a weekly timetable and, where the pharmacy has filled them in, two extra tables: hours on public holidays and hours for late-night duty. The site also keeps a separate list of public late-night pharmacies. The interface is in Korean only, but you need very few words to use it, and they are listed below.

Three ways to search without Korean

1. By location: when the page asks for your location, allow it and it lists pharmacies near you. If you refuse, the map search centres on the association’s headquarters instead, which is no help if you are elsewhere
2. By map: tap 지도로 검색 (search on the map), then move the map to where you are staying
3. By district: tap 행정구역으로 검색 (search by administrative area), choose the province or city, then the district (시/군/구). If you are not sure which district you are in, any pharmacy or district page on this site shows the Korean name

The search box also takes a pharmacy name, a road name or a neighbourhood name in Korean; the site’s own examples are a neighbourhood such as 서초동 and a road such as 효령로. Copying the Korean address line from this site and keeping only the neighbourhood (the part ending in 동) or the road (ending in 로 or 길) usually works.

Words you will see on the results

Korean phrases for the phone call and the counter

Why it may disagree with this site

The two services do not read the same records. This site uses the national pharmacy registry that the National Emergency Medical Center publishes on the public data portal. Pharm114’s hours are maintained by each pharmacy’s owner through the pharmacists’ association’s member pages. The two are kept separately, so a pharmacy can update one and not the other.

We cannot tell you which one is right on a given day, and we do not try. When they differ, treat both as leads rather than answers. A pharmacy that shows holiday hours on either service is a better bet than one that shows none, and a phone call settles it.

Pharm114 says the same thing we do. Its results page asks you to call the pharmacy before visiting, because working hours can change with circumstances. Holidays, especially Seollal and Chuseok, are when that matters most.

Other official routes on a holiday

• Call 119 and ask which pharmacy is on duty nearby. The government’s legal-information service lists this as one of the two ways to find a holiday duty pharmacy
• E-Gen, run by the National Emergency Medical Center, has a pharmacy search on a map (Korean)
• The Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service runs a hospital and pharmacy finder on its own site (Korean)
• This site’s map and district pages show the registered hours in English, including the Korean name and address to show a driver

Pharmacies open now on the map

Public holidays and pharmacy closures

Finding a late-night pharmacy

Pick a region for its districts: pharmacies open now in each one, and the lists for late nights, Sundays and public holidays.

• Seoul
• Busan
• Daegu
• Incheon
• Gwangju
• Daejeon
• Ulsan
• Sejong
• Gyeonggi
• Gangwon
• Chungbuk
• Chungnam
• Jeonbuk
• Jeonnam
• Gyeongbuk
• Gyeongnam
• Jeju