Nearly 50,000 reported missing last year, half of them children

A total of 25,171 children, 8,315 people with disabilities and 15,836 suffering from dementia were reported missing in 2024, government data showed Friday.

The Ministry of Health and Welfare and the National Police Agency said they have submitted the annual report on missing persons cases to the National Assembly, which showed that 49,624 cases were reported to the authorities last year. Of those, 48,872 were disappearances.

Most cases have been resolved, but 121 remain active. Children account for over half at 64 cases, while 41 people with disabilities and 16 people with dementia remain missing.

People with disabilities were most likely out of the three groups to remain missing, as 0.49 percent of them were not found after being reported missing in 2024.. The figure is 0.25 percent for children, and 0.1 percent for people with dementia. The Health Ministry and the NPA vowed to review for more effective measures to track down the disabled people who go missing.

The report showed that 95.1 percent of missing persons cases were resolved within the first two days of being reported, trending upward from 93.3 percent in 2022 and 94.1 percent in 2023. Nearly half (43.1 percent) of the cases were resolved within one hour, a proportion that also increased compared to 39.5 percent in 2022 and 41.4 percent in 2023.

The South Korean government uses various methods to aid missing persons investigations, such as registering cases with the National Forensic Service database. As of 2024, the NFS had accumulated data of 43,835 individuals prone to going missing, along with genetic information about their guardians for matching purposes.

Despite the efforts to track down missing people, a May report showed that 1,417 children and people with mental disabilities remained missing for over a year as of 2025. Most of them (1,128) have remained missing for at least 20 years, 1,050 of whom were children when they were reported missing.

In July, a 61-year-old who got lost as a 7-year-old was reunited with her family. The Seoul police commenced the search at the request of her mother, who said she wished to see the long-lost daughter "just one more time before I die."