This study examines family formation among young adults in major cities outside the Seoul metropolitan area. It explores how young people envision and pursue family formation under constrained opportunity structures amid ultra-low fertility and youth outmigration. The findings show that economic conditions, such as employment and housing, interact with local cultural contexts, peer influences, and gender disparities in economic opportunities to shape young people’s family formation prospects and practices. In addition, under conditions of pervasive employment instability in regional labor markets, marriage is increasingly reinterpreted as a means of securing stability, whereas childbearing is not.