National Data Office honors 3,741 awardees for 2025 census work

The National Data Office presented 3,741 awards to the civil servants, survey workers and private organizations that carried out South Korea's largest statistical surveys, including the 2025 population and housing census.

The awards ceremony, held Nov. 2 at the government complex in Daejeon, recognized work on the 2025 population and housing census, the agriculture, forestry and fisheries census, and the 2025 economic census. Chief Ahn Hyung-jun presided. About 110,000 survey workers took part.

The awards comprised 3,545 individual citations and 196 institutional ones. Seven orders and medals were conferred, including the Order of Service Merit, Green Stripes, to Kwak Mi-suk, a division head at the office, and to Woo Young-je, a bureau chief, along with service medals to officials from Busan and the Gwangju-Jeonnam integrated city.

Twenty-nine people received presidential citations, among them Professor Park Min-gyu of Korea University, and 33 received prime ministerial citations. Four institutions — the cities of Busan and Seoul, Buan County in North Jeolla Province and the Korea Federation of SMEs — won presidential citations, while 12 organizations, including the Korea Enterprises Federation and Ulsan, received prime ministerial citations.

The 2025 population and housing census marked 100 years since Korea's first modern census and added new items on family care, languages used within households and marriage intentions to reflect recent demographic change. The agriculture, forestry and fisheries census expanded its use of administrative records to 22 types from 18 and added items on rice-paddy water management and smart farming. The economic census introduced items on artificial intelligence and robots, smart factories and unmanned stores, and cut field surveys by shifting to online responses and administrative data.

The office also built a new integrated management system that digitized the entire census process and introduced an AI-based call center and stronger online response tools.

"I thank the people who took time out of their busy lives to respond sincerely to the censuses," Ahn said. "Thanks to the dedication of the 110,000 survey workers and related organizations including local governments, we were able to successfully carry out the large-scale censuses that form the backbone of national statistics even in difficult conditions."