Baby-Changing Tables in Korea, by Province

One in nine toilets has a changing table on record

Across the 51,228 public toilets in Korea’s national open-data catalogue, 5,746 — 11.2% — are recorded as having a baby-changing table. That is the national figure. The provincial figures are far more interesting, because they disagree with each other by a factor of seven.

As with every field in this dataset, 11.2% is a registration rate: it counts the toilets where somebody filled in the changing-table field, not the toilets that physically have one. The field cannot be left blank, so a missing answer is stored as “no”. We only ever count the “yes” values.

Changing-table registration by province

Jeju records a changing table at 29.2% of its toilets. Gyeonggi records one at 4.3% of its. That is a 6.8× gap — wider than the 3.9× spread we found for wheelchair-accessible facilities in the same dataset, and it runs in a direction that is hard to explain away.

The province with the most toilets records the fewest tables

Gyeonggi is Korea’s most populous province and the one that surrounds Seoul. It contributes 12,245 toilets to the national catalogue — 24% of every record in the country, and more than twice the next-largest contributor. On raw effort, its open-data programme is the biggest in Korea.

Now compare it with Jeonnam & Gwangju, which files 5,377 toilets — well under half as many. Jeonnam & Gwangju records 739 changing tables. Gyeonggi records 517. The province with 2.3 times more toilets on file documents fewer changing tables in absolute terms, never mind as a share.

We cannot tell you why from the data alone, and we are not going to guess. What the numbers support is a narrower claim: Gyeonggi’s toilet records are less complete on this particular field than almost anywhere else in the country. Whether the tables are missing or merely undocumented is not something this dataset can answer.

It is worth saying plainly what the alternative reading would be. If you took 4.3% at face value as a presence rate, you would conclude that a parent in Gyeonggi has roughly a one-in-twenty-four chance of finding a changing table in a public toilet. We do not believe that, and we do not think the data says it.

Where the small provinces do well

The top of the table is dominated by places with modest toilet counts. Jeju (1,099 toilets), Ulsan (929) and Sejong (536) take the top three registration rates. Sejong is a purpose-built administrative city with the smallest catalogue in the country and the second-highest accessible-facility registration rate as well.

That pattern — smaller catalogue, more complete records — shows up in both fields we have examined, and it is the single most useful thing to know about Korean open data. Completeness tends to scale inversely with volume. A province filing five hundred records can check every one; a province filing twelve thousand cannot, and it shows.

Daegu is the interesting exception: 1,812 toilets at 22.4%, comfortably above the national average despite a mid-sized catalogue. Whatever Daegu does when it collects this data, it is working.

Do the same provinces fill in every field?

If low registration rates simply reflected under-resourced record-keeping, you would expect a province that documents changing tables badly to document everything badly. Mostly that holds — and the exceptions are the interesting part.

Jeonbuk is consistent: last on both fields, 17.8% and 5.5%. Jeju and Ulsan are consistent the other way, near the top of both. For most provinces the two rates move together, which is what you would expect if completeness were an office-level property.

Gyeonggi breaks the pattern completely. It sits 4th of 15 on accessible facilities at 50.7% — above the national average — and dead last on changing tables at 4.3%. A 46.4-point gap, the widest in the country. Whatever process fills in Gyeonggi’s accessibility field is clearly working; whatever should fill in the changing-table field is evidently not running at all.

That tells you something useful about how to read this data generally: completeness is a property of a field, not of a province. A dataset that is trustworthy on one column can be near-empty on the next, and the only way to know is to check the column you actually care about.

If you are travelling with a baby

• Department stores and large malls are the reliable option, and they are not really in this dataset. Korean department stores typically have dedicated nursing and changing rooms on multiple floors, usually better equipped than anything in a public toilet block.
• Subway stations in the larger cities generally have changing facilities in the accessible toilet, whether or not the open data says so.
• Highway rest areas are consistently well equipped for families — they are built for long drives with children.
• Do not rule out an unlabelled toilet. In Gyeonggi, Jeonbuk and Gyeongbuk especially, the field is left blank far more often than it is filled in, so absence of a label carries very little information.

Korea also runs a separate network of dedicated nursing rooms (수유실) in public buildings, transport hubs and large stores, which is a different dataset with different coverage — and a better bet than a public toilet if you have the choice.

One last thing this data cannot tell you, and it is the thing you would most want to know: whether the changing table is in the women’s toilet, the men’s, or both. The field is a single yes/no with no location attached. Fathers travelling alone with an infant in Korea will recognise the problem, and no amount of analysis of this dataset will solve it — the information was never collected.

Sources and method

Counts were taken directly from the toilet catalogue behind Bballi Bballi on 6 August 2026 — 51,228 records, of which 31,529 come from the national standard dataset and the remainder from provincial and municipal open-data feeds following the same schema.

• Primary source: 전국공중화장실표준데이터 — Nationwide Public Toilet Standard Data, Ministry of the Interior and Safety.
• Counting method: a toilet counts as having a changing table only where the field is explicitly marked yes. Rates are that count divided by all records in the province.
• Record freshness: 85.5% of records carry a 2026 timestamp, but those timestamps mark when our copy was refreshed, not when a facility was last inspected.