According to the US Department of Statement and the South Korean foreign ministry, the US and South Korea reached an agreement on a new five-year plan on Friday regarding the cost-sharing of maintaining US troops in South Korea.
For 2026, the nations agreed to raise defense costs by 8.3 percent to 1.52 trillion won ($1.13 billion), South Korea’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
Seoul and Washington launched the talks earlier than usual in what was seen as a bid to conclude the negotiations before the US election in November.
Lee Tae-woo, South Korea’s chief negotiator, and Linda Specht, the top US negotiator for talks on defense cost sharing with Korea, finalized the new deal after eight rounds of talks that began in April, held just before the existing deals were due to expire next year.
Some 28,500 American troops are stationed in South Korea as part of efforts to deter nuclear-armed North Korea.
South Korea began shouldering the costs of US deployments, used to fund local labor, the construction of military installations and other logistics support, in the early 1990s.
Donald Trump, the Republican nominee in the November election, had during his presidency accused South Korea, a key Asian ally, of “free-riding” on US military might, and demanded that it pay as much as $5 billion a year for the US deployment.
During his presidency, both sides had struggled for months to make progress, before reaching a deal with his successor Joe Biden, when Seoul agreed to increase its contribution by 13.9 percent, the biggest annual rise in nearly two decades.
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