The paper aims to establish the characteristics of the Korean firms' R&D investment and to estimate the private rate of return to R&D investment. For the empirical analysis, a balanced panel data is constructed with 695 firms on 8 year observations. The panel data enables to characterize R&D investment of the Korean firms, which is mostly conformed to the 'stylized facts' of R&D investment that found in the previous studies on foreign firms. Klette model was used to estimate the private rate of return on R&D investment and depreciation rate of R&D capital. The paper estimates that the rate of return on R&D investment is 10.5% on average or 16.4% on median for the whole industry whereas manufacturing firms show 10.4% on average or 16.4% on median. The depreciation rate was estimated about 32.9% for whole industry, where it ranges from the minimum 11.6% for metal industry and 49.5% for services. The median estimate of the rate of return for R&D investment of Korean firms is roughly two times higher than real interest rates for the same period, which implies that R&D investment allows sizable rent in addition to the opportunity cost of capital investment.