Average Salary in Japan 2026: What People Really Earn, and What It Buys in Tokyo

Last reviewed 21 Aug 2026 · 26 min read

The average salary in Japan is ¥4,775,000 a year. That figure is a record high, it has risen four years running, and it tells you less than you would hope.

It sits above what most people earn. It bundles Tokyo together with Aomori. It covers a full-time career employee and a part-timer in the same number. And it describes income earned in 2024, published in late 2025, and read by you in 2026, by which point rent on a small Tokyo apartment has climbed more than 12% in a year.

This guide is written for people deciding whether a salary offer in Japan actually works, not for people browsing country comparisons. So we have done three things differently. Every figure traces to a named Japanese government survey with the year the data covers, not the year it was published. We separate the average from what the typical worker earns, because the gap is the whole story. And we finish by tying salary bands to what they rent you in Tokyo, which is the question behind the question almost every time someone asks us what a good salary in Japan looks like.

Some of this is genuinely good news. Wages are rising faster than they have in three decades and real pay has beaten inflation for six months straight. Some of it is not. We will be clear about which is which.

Average annual salary	¥4,775,000 (2024 income)
Median household income	¥4,510,000 (2024 income)
Average monthly wage	¥340,600 (June 2025)
Tokyo monthly wage	¥418,300, highest in Japan
Lowest prefecture	Aomori, ¥263,900
Minimum wage	¥1,121/hour national average
2026 pay round	+5.01% (Rengo final tally)
Real wages	+1.6% year on year, June 2026

Quick Answer: What Is the Average Salary in Japan?

¥4,775,000 per year before tax, according to the National Tax Agency's most recent Private Sector Salary Survey. That covers 51.4 million people who worked a full calendar year in 2024, and it includes bonuses.

Men in that survey averaged ¥5,867,000 and women ¥3,332,000. Permanent employees averaged ¥5,449,000; everyone else averaged ¥2,063,000. Those two splits do more work than the headline number does.

If you want a monthly figure instead, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare puts contractual monthly pay for full-time workers at ¥340,600 as of June 2025, excluding overtime and bonuses. In Tokyo the same measure is ¥418,300.

And if you are asking because you have an offer in front of you: roughly 78% of a ¥5m gross salary lands in your account after tax and social insurance, and Japanese landlords will expect your rent to sit at or under a third of that.

The Headline Numbers, and Which Survey to Trust

Two Japanese government surveys dominate every salary article you will read about Japan, including this one. They measure different things, and mixing them is the single most common error in English-language coverage.

The National Tax Agency's Private Sector Salary Survey (民間給与実態統計調査) reports annual gross pay including bonuses, for people employed the full calendar year at private-sector firms. The latest edition covers 2024 and was published in September 2025.

The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare's Basic Survey on Wage Structure (賃金構造基本統計調査) reports contractual monthly cash earnings in June of the survey year, excluding overtime and bonuses, at establishments with ten or more employees. The latest edition covers June 2025 and was published in March 2026.

So the annual figure is bigger partly because it includes bonuses and the monthly one does not. Multiplying ¥340,600 by twelve gives you ¥4,087,200, which is not the average annual salary and never was.

Measure	Figure	What it covers
Average annual salary	¥4,775,000	Gross, incl. bonuses, 2024
Average annual salary, men	¥5,867,000	Gross, incl. bonuses, 2024
Average annual salary, women	¥3,332,000	Gross, incl. bonuses, 2024
Average monthly wage	¥340,600	Contractual, excl. bonuses, June 2025
Average annual bonus	¥746,000	Total across the year, 2024
Base pay component	¥4,029,000	Annual, excl. bonuses, 2024

Sources: National Tax Agency, Private Sector Salary Survey FY2024; MHLW, Basic Survey on Wage Structure 2025. Treat these as national averages rather than what any individual job pays. Japanese government statistics pages are published in Japanese, and that applies to every official source we link below.

The ¥4,775,000 figure rose 3.9% on the previous year and is the highest since the survey began. That is real progress, and we will come back to why it still does not feel like progress to a lot of people living here.

Average vs Median: Why Most People Earn Less Than the Average

Here is the thing the headline number hides. Income distributions are lopsided. A relatively small group of high earners pulls the average upward, so the average sits above what the person in the middle actually takes home.

Japan does not publish an official median individual salary. It does publish a median household income, and the gap there is instructive: median household income was ¥4,510,000 against a mean of ¥5,752,000, and 61.5% of households earned at or below the mean. Both figures cover 2024 income and come from the 2025 Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions.

The individual picture shows the same skew. In the tax agency's data, workers earning over ¥8m are 12.0% of all earners and pay 73.6% of all withheld income tax.

Where Salaries Actually Cluster

Annual income	Share of workers
Under ¥2m	18.8%
¥2m to ¥3m	13.2%
¥3m to ¥4m	16.1%
¥4m to ¥5m	15.3%
¥5m to ¥6m	11.8%
¥6m to ¥8m	12.9%
¥8m to ¥10m	5.8%
Over ¥10m	6.2%

Source: National Tax Agency, Private Sector Salary Survey FY2024, distribution by salary band.

Read that table properly and it reframes the whole conversation. The largest single band is ¥3m to ¥4m, and 48.1% of all salaried workers in Japan earn under ¥4m. The "average" salary of ¥4,775,000 already puts you in roughly the top 40%.

That matters if you are negotiating. An offer of ¥6m is not slightly above average in Japan. It is comfortably inside the top quarter of all earners.

Regular vs Non-Regular Work: Japan's Real Pay Divide

The gap that shapes Japanese pay is not gender, or age, or industry. It is contract type.

Permanent employees (正社員, seishain) averaged ¥5,449,000 in 2024. Everyone else, which covers part-timers, contract staff and dispatch workers, averaged ¥2,063,000. That is a 2.6x difference, and it persists in the monthly data too: ¥358,800 against ¥241,700.

This is not simply a matter of hours. Non-regular work carries weaker job security, thinner bonuses, less training and a much flatter pay curve over a career. A permanent employee's pay climbs steadily into their fifties. A non-regular worker's largely does not.

There is also evidence the divide drags down the people on the good side of it. Research by Fukao, Perugini and Pompei, published in Economica in 2023 and tested on Japanese industry data from 1970 to 2012, found that in industries with a higher share of non-regular employment, regular workers captured a smaller share of company profits. The argument is that a large, easily substituted non-regular workforce weakens everyone's bargaining position. It is one study rather than a settled consensus, but it fits the wage stagnation Japan spent three decades in.

For anyone arriving from abroad, the practical takeaway is blunt. The contract type on your offer letter will shape your earnings more than your job title does. A 契約社員 (contract employee) position at a well-known company is not equivalent to a 正社員 position at a smaller one.

Average Salary in Tokyo and How the Regions Compare

Tokyo pays ¥418,300 a month against a national average of ¥340,600. That is ¥77,700 more, or 22.8% above the national figure, and Tokyo is comfortably the highest-paying prefecture in Japan.

What surprises most people is how few places clear the national average at all. Only four prefectures do: Tokyo, Kanagawa, Aichi and Osaka. Chiba comes fifth and still falls just short.

Prefecture	Average monthly wage	vs national
Tokyo	¥418,300	+22.8%
Kanagawa	¥368,600	+8.2%
Osaka	¥348,900	+2.4%
Aichi	¥341,600	+0.3%
National average	¥340,600	—
Chiba	¥339,100	−0.4%
Fukuoka	¥314,300	−7.7%
Hokkaido	¥297,100	−12.8%
Aomori	¥263,900	−22.5%

Source: MHLW, Basic Survey on Wage Structure 2025, contractual monthly pay by prefecture, June 2025.

The spread between Tokyo and Aomori is ¥154,400 a month, which works out to a Tokyo salary being 58% higher than the lowest prefecture's.

Before you read that as a straightforward case for moving to Tokyo, note what happens to the other side of the ledger. Tokyo pays 22.8% above the national average. Rent on a small Tokyo apartment rose 12.4% in the twelve months to June 2026 alone. The pay premium is real, it is just not keeping pace with the thing it is supposed to pay for.

If you are weighing a Tokyo salary against somewhere cheaper, our comparison of Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka rents and cost of living puts the two sides of that trade next to each other.

Salary by Age in Japan

Japanese pay still rises with age more predictably than in most developed economies, a legacy of the seniority system (年功序列, nenkō joretsu) that has softened but not disappeared.

Age	All	Men	Women
20 to 24	¥242,800	¥245,700	¥239,600
25 to 29	¥279,400	¥288,000	¥268,800
30 to 34	¥312,300	¥330,400	¥283,200
35 to 39	¥340,600	¥366,200	¥292,400
40 to 44	¥364,300	¥398,200	¥303,600
45 to 49	¥377,900	¥420,700	¥305,700
50 to 54	¥388,800	¥437,500	¥305,400
55 to 59	¥396,200	¥445,600	¥305,700
60 to 64	¥329,300	¥358,500	¥270,800

Source: MHLW, Basic Survey on Wage Structure 2025, contractual monthly pay by age, June 2025.

Three things jump out.

Pay peaks at 55 to 59 and then drops sharply. That fall at 60 is not a slowdown in productivity, it is the retirement-and-rehire system: many companies retire staff at 60 and bring them back on new contracts at reduced pay.

Men and women start at almost the same place. At 20 to 24 the gap is ¥6,100 a month. By 50 to 54 it is ¥132,100.

And women's pay effectively stops climbing after 40. The male curve keeps rising for another fifteen years; the female curve flattens at around ¥305,000 and stays there.

Salary by Education Level

Education	All	Men	Women
High school	¥297,200	¥321,700	¥245,000
Vocational school (専門学校)	¥313,700	¥338,300	¥287,500
Technical/junior college	¥321,200	¥375,300	¥294,400
University	¥396,300	¥429,600	¥327,400
Graduate school	¥517,400	¥534,800	¥438,200

Source: MHLW, Basic Survey on Wage Structure 2025, contractual monthly pay by education, June 2025.

A university degree is worth about ¥99,100 a month over a high school qualification. A postgraduate degree adds another ¥121,100 on top of that, which is the largest single step on the table and reflects how concentrated Japanese graduate education is in engineering, pharmaceuticals and research roles.

Starting salaries compress all of this considerably. New graduates begin at ¥207,300 (high school), ¥230,700 (vocational), ¥235,500 (technical or junior college), ¥262,300 (university) and ¥299,000 (graduate school) per month. The gap between a high school starter and a university starter is ¥55,000. Thirty years later it is roughly ¥99,100. The degree premium in Japan compounds slowly rather than arriving at once.

Salary by Industry in Japan

Industry is the lever most people can actually pull, and the spread is wide: the top-paying sector pays roughly three times the bottom one.

Industry	Average annual salary
Electricity, gas, heat supply and water	¥8,324,000
Finance and insurance	¥7,023,000
Information and communications	¥6,595,000
Manufacturing	¥5,676,000
Construction	¥5,654,000
Academic research, professional services, education	¥5,493,000
Real estate and goods rental	¥4,955,000
Transport and postal services	¥4,876,000
All industries	¥4,775,000
Medical and welfare	¥4,290,000
Wholesale and retail	¥4,096,000
Accommodation and food service	¥2,793,000

Source: National Tax Agency, Private Sector Salary Survey FY2024, average pay by industry.

Utilities top the table, which surprises people who expect finance or tech to. Japan's power and gas sector is small, heavily unionized, technically demanding and dominated by a handful of large regional firms, and it pays accordingly.

Information and communications at ¥6,595,000 is the number most foreign professionals will care about, since it covers software, telecoms and IT services. It runs 38% above the national average, and Semrush data shows "average IT salary in Japan" is one of the most-searched salary questions about the country, which tells you where the interest is.

Accommodation and food service at ¥2,793,000 is the floor, and it is worth pausing on. That sector is not badly paid because of low hours alone. It carries the highest concentration of non-regular contracts of any major industry, which loops back to the divide above.

The Gender Pay Gap in Japan

Women in Japan earn 76.6% of what men earn, measured on contractual monthly pay.

That figure is the narrowest gap since comparable records began in 1976, and it improved 0.8 points in a single year. Both of those things are true and worth saying. It is also still a very large gap by international standards. On the OECD's measure, which compares median full-time earnings, the OECD average is 88.7 with men at 100. Japan sits at 78.0, according to the Cabinet Office's 2025 White Paper on Gender Equality.

The mechanics behind it are visible in the age table above. Men and women enter the workforce on near-identical pay. The gap opens in the thirties, widens through the forties, and by the fifties it is ¥132,100 a month. That timing points at career interruption around childbirth, the difficulty of returning to a permanent contract afterwards, and the concentration of women in non-regular work.

There is no version of this where the number explains itself. If you are a woman negotiating a salary in Japan, the useful information is that the gap is structural rather than a matter of individual bargaining, and that international employers in Japan generally show narrower gaps than domestic ones.

Minimum Wage in Japan 2026

Japan sets minimum wages by prefecture, revised each fall. The rates below are the ones currently in force.

Prefecture	Hourly minimum	In force since
Tokyo	¥1,226	3 Oct 2025
Kanagawa	¥1,225	4 Oct 2025
Osaka	¥1,177	16 Oct 2025
Aichi	¥1,140	18 Oct 2025
Fukuoka	¥1,057	16 Nov 2025
Miyazaki, Kochi, Okinawa	¥1,023	Nov to Dec 2025
National weighted average	¥1,121	FY2025

Source: MHLW, national list of regional minimum wages. Rates are revised each fall, so check the current figure before relying on it.

On 28 July 2026 the Central Minimum Wage Council issued its guideline for the next revision: an increase of ¥54 for the highest-cost prefectures and ¥56 for the rest, which would take the national weighted average to ¥1,176, a rise of 4.9%. That guideline carries no legal force. Each prefecture's own council sets the binding figure, and those take effect from around October 2026. Any Tokyo number you see quoted for this fall is arithmetic rather than an announcement.

A full-time worker on Tokyo's current ¥1,226, at 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, grosses ¥2,550,080 a year. After tax and social insurance that is roughly ¥2m, or about ¥168,000 a month. Set against a ¥114,242 average rent for a small Tokyo apartment, that arithmetic does not work without flatmates, a much older building, or a long commute from outside the 23 wards.

The government's stated target is a ¥1,500 national weighted average. The deadline has moved: the 2026 economic policy framework now sets it as "as early as possible, and no later than the first half of the 2030s", replacing the previous commitment to reach it within the 2020s.

Bonuses and What Actually Reaches Your Account

Japanese bonuses are not discretionary end-of-year gifts. They are a structural part of annual pay, usually paid twice, in summer and winter, and calculated as a multiple of monthly base salary.

The tax agency puts the average annual bonus across all firm sizes at ¥746,000, which is 18.5% of average base pay. Men averaged ¥957,000 and women ¥466,000.

You will also see much larger numbers reported each June and December. Keidanren's 2026 summer tally came in at ¥1,042,537, up 7.04% and a record since the series began in 1981. That survey covers large listed companies with unionized workforces, and it runs roughly 30% to 40% above the whole-economy figure. It is a real number about a specific slice of the economy, not a national average.

Gross to Take-Home

Ask what a salary is worth and the honest answer starts with subtraction. Income tax, resident tax, health insurance, pension and employment insurance come off before you see anything.

Gross annual salary	Approximate take-home	Ratio
¥3,000,000	~¥2,365,000	~79%
¥5,000,000	~¥3,885,000	~78%
¥8,000,000	~¥5,879,000	~74%

Illustrative figures for a single person with no dependents, FY2025 rates. Your own deductions vary with age, dependents, prefecture and company scheme.

Note the direction of travel. The higher your gross, the smaller the share you keep, because income tax is progressive while social insurance contributions are capped. Somewhere around ¥8m the ratio drops under 75%.

Is Pay in Japan Actually Rising? The 2026 Picture

Yes, and by more than at any point in the last three decades. This is the part of the story that has genuinely changed.

Year	Average increase	As a percentage
2023	¥10,560	3.58%
2024	¥15,281	5.10%
2025	¥16,356	5.25%
2026	¥16,400	5.01%

Source: Rengo, final tally of the 2026 spring wage negotiations, published July 2026. Covers unionized workplaces, not the whole economy.

Three consecutive years above 5% in the spring wage round (春闘, shuntō) is without modern precedent. Small and medium firms, which lag in most years, came in at 4.69% in 2026, up from 4.65% the year before. Part-time and fixed-term workers did better still, at roughly 6.18%.

More importantly, pay is now beating prices. Real wages rose 1.6% year on year in June 2026, the sixth consecutive monthly increase, according to the Monthly Labour Survey, against core inflation of 1.8% in July. For most of 2022 to 2024 that relationship ran the other way and Japanese households got quietly poorer each month.

Two forces are doing the work. The first is a labor shortage that is not going away: the jobs-to-applicants ratio stood at 1.18 in June 2026, and the Recruit Works Institute, a private think tank, projects a shortfall of 11 million workers by 2040. The second is policy. Prime Minister Takaichi's government has made sustained wage growth above inflation an explicit goal of its economic program, with a stated norm of around 1% real wage growth a year through FY2029.

Why It Still Doesn't Feel Like a Pay Rise

Because the baseline it is recovering from is very low, and because the recovery is measured in yen while a lot of what Japan buys is priced in dollars.

Takatoshi Ito put the long view starkly in the Asian Economic Policy Review in 2025. Japan's per capita GDP relative to the United States in 2025 is roughly where it stood in 1980, and the yen's purchasing power is back to early-1970s levels. His summary is one sentence: "Japan has become poorer since the mid-1990s."

On why wages sat still for so long, D. Hugh Whittaker's 2024 paper in Asia Pacific Business Review points at where corporate money went. Between 2000 and 2020, domestic capital and R&D spending languished and employee wages stagnated, while shareholder returns surged. Three consecutive 5% pay rounds are a correction to that, not a windfall on top of it.

So both things are true. Japanese pay is rising at rates nobody under fifty has worked through before, and a record-high average salary of ¥4,775,000 still buys less in global terms than a smaller number did twenty years ago.

What Foreign Residents Earn in Japan

There are now 2,571,037 foreign workers in Japan, as of the end of October 2025. That is a record, up 11.7% in a single year, and it means roughly one in twenty-six workers in the country is foreign.

The headline pay comparison looks bad and needs careful reading.

Group	Average monthly wage
All workers in Japan	¥340,600
All foreign workers	¥254,300
Professional and technical visa holders	¥313,200
Status-based residents (spouse, PR)	¥311,100
Specified Skilled Worker	¥221,400
Technical Intern Training	¥190,300

Source: MHLW, Basic Survey on Wage Structure 2025, June 2025.

Before drawing conclusions from the ¥86,300 gap: foreign workers in that survey average 32.5 years old with 3.3 years of tenure, against 44.4 years old and 12.7 years for the workforce overall. In a country where pay rises with age and length of service more than almost anywhere else, that composition difference explains a great deal of the gap. No Japanese ministry publishes a like-for-like comparison adjusted for age, industry and tenure, so anyone telling you the gap is or is not discrimination is going beyond the data.

Professional and technical visa holders, the category most readers of this guide will fall into, averaged ¥313,200 and saw the fastest growth of any group at 7.3%.

The Rule That Protects Your Salary

If you hold or are applying for the Engineer/Specialist in Humanities/International Services visa (技術・人文知識・国際業務), your employer must pay you at least as much as a Japanese national doing the same work. That is not a guideline, it is a landing-permission criterion, and Immigration cites refusals on exactly these grounds. Their own published example is an application rejected where the offer was ¥170,000 a month while a Japanese employee in the same role received ¥200,000.

Allowances that reimburse expenses, such as commuting or housing allowances, generally do not count toward that comparison.

Salary and the Highly Skilled Professional Route

If you are thinking beyond the first job, salary feeds directly into the Highly Skilled Professional (高度専門職) points system, which fast-tracks permanent residency. You need 70 points to qualify, and there is an absolute floor: annual income below ¥3,000,000 disqualifies you regardless of every other category.

Annual income	Points (by age)
¥10,000,000+	40 at any age
¥9,000,000	35 at any age
¥8,000,000	30 at any age
¥7,000,000	25 if under 40
¥6,000,000	20 if under 40
¥5,000,000	15 if under 35
¥4,000,000	10 if under 30

Source: Immigration Services Agency, Highly Skilled Professional points table (PDF). Income counted is from your main sponsoring employer; bonuses count, overtime does not.

The practical consequence is that a salary bump from ¥6.9m to ¥7m at age 38 is worth five points, which can be the difference between a five-year residence status and a one-year renewal cycle. It is worth checking the table before you accept an offer rather than after.

If you are working out whether an offer clears the bar for a visa renewal or a move, our guide to Japan work visa requirements, processing times and renewals covers what Immigration looks at beyond the salary line.

What Salary Do You Need to Live in Tokyo?

This is the question underneath almost every salary search, and the data pages that rank for it mostly do not answer it. So here is the arithmetic.

Japanese landlords and letting agents apply a rough rule: your rent should not exceed about a third of your monthly income. UR, the public housing agency, states the screening version plainly, which is that applicants are commonly expected to show monthly income of at least three times the rent, or annual income of at least 36 times the monthly rent. UR's own advice is to run that calculation on take-home pay rather than gross, which is stricter and more honest.

Average rent for a small apartment of 30㎡ or less in Tokyo's 23 wards was ¥114,242 in June 2026. That figure has now set a post-2015 record for 25 consecutive months, and it is up 12.4% year on year.

Monthly rent	Gross monthly income needed	Approx. gross annual	Where you stand
¥80,000	¥240,000	~¥2,880,000	Outer wards or older stock
¥114,242	¥342,726	~¥4,110,000	The 23-ward average
¥150,000	¥450,000	~¥5,400,000	Central wards, small unit
¥200,000	¥600,000	~¥7,200,000	Central, or family-sized

Applies the 3x monthly income convention to gross pay. Screening on take-home instead raises each income figure by roughly a quarter.

Look at what that table says next to the distribution earlier in this guide. Renting an average small Tokyo apartment on the standard screening ratio calls for something close to ¥4.1m a year, and 48.1% of salaried workers in Japan earn under ¥4m. Tokyo's higher wages absorb part of that, but not all of it, and rent has been climbing faster than pay for two years.

This is not an abstract problem for a minority. Single-person households made up around 50.3% of all households in Tokyo at the 2020 census, 3.63 million of them, and that share has been rising for decades. The apartment type under the most price pressure is the one most Tokyo residents live in.

Some context on what "rich" means locally, from our own channel:

Watch the full clip on our YouTube channel.

Rent is only part of what you pay to move in. Our breakdown of the fees to budget for when renting in Japan covers key money, deposits, guarantor fees and agency commission, which together typically run four to six months of rent up front.

Is Your Salary Good for Japan? A Band-by-Band Read

Averages are a poor tool for answering this, so use the distribution instead. Every band below is where you actually sit among Japan's 51.4 million full-year salaried workers.

Under ¥3,000,000. Roughly the bottom 32%. Workable outside the major cities and difficult inside Tokyo without flatmates or a long commute. Also below the ¥3m floor for the Highly Skilled Professional route.

¥3,000,000 to ¥4,000,000. The single largest band at 16.1%, and just below the median. This is a normal Japanese salary, and in Tokyo it will have you comparing wards carefully rather than choosing freely.

¥4,000,000 to ¥5,000,000. 15.3% of workers, and the band containing the national average. Comfortable in most of Japan. In Tokyo it covers an average small apartment on the standard screening ratio with room to save, provided you are not also supporting anyone.

¥5,000,000 to ¥8,000,000. 24.7% of workers across these bands. You are in the top third and then the top quarter. This is where most professional foreign hires on a technical visa land, and where central Tokyo becomes a genuine option rather than a stretch.

¥8,000,000 to ¥10,000,000. 5.8%. Top 12%. Comfortable anywhere in Japan, including a family-sized place in a central ward, though your take-home ratio has now slipped under 75%.

Over ¥10,000,000. 6.2%. This is where the tax data gets interesting: everyone above ¥8m is 12% of earners and pays 73.6% of all withheld income tax.

Practical Advice from E-Housing

A few things we find ourselves saying to clients often enough that they belong in writing.

Ask about the contract type before the number. A ¥4.5m permanent role and a ¥4.5m contract role are not the same job. The permanent one carries a pay curve, bonus participation and far better odds in rental screening.

Ask how the bonus is structured. Bonuses run around 18% of pay nationally but vary enormously between employers. If a stated annual figure includes four months of bonus, your monthly cash flow, and therefore what you can rent, is smaller than the headline suggests.

Do the rental arithmetic on take-home, not gross. Screening formally uses gross in most cases, but you will be living on the net figure, and the gap is around 22% at a ¥5m salary.

If you are near a points threshold, say so in the negotiation. Moving from ¥6.9m to ¥7m at 38 is worth five Highly Skilled Professional points. Employers who hire foreign staff regularly understand this and it is a cheaper concession for them than most.

Expect screening to be about stability, not just income. Visa type, employment type and length of employment all weigh on a rental application alongside the salary figure.

If your application has been turned down and nobody explained why, our guide to why rental applications from foreign residents get rejected walks through what the landlord, the agent and the guarantee company are each looking at.

What to Watch Over the Next Year

Three things will move these numbers, and all three land within twelve months.

The FY2026 prefectural minimum wages are finalized through the fall of 2026, taking the national average to around ¥1,176 if councils follow the guideline.

The National Tax Agency publishes its FY2025 salary survey around September 2026. Given the 2026 pay round came in at 5.01%, expect the average annual salary to clear ¥4.9m and quite possibly ¥5m for the first time.

And rent is the variable to watch most closely, because it is the one moving fastest. Small-unit Tokyo rent rose 12.4% in a year while wages rose about 3%. If that continues, the salary you need to live in Tokyo will keep rising faster than the salary you are offered to work there.

At E-Housing, we work with foreigners, expat families, international students and working professionals across greater Tokyo every day. We see what salaries clear rental screening in practice, which wards stretch a given budget furthest, and where the gap between a listed rent and the real move-in cost catches people out.

If you have an offer in hand and want to know what it actually rents you in Tokyo, tell us the number and the ward you have in mind. We will give you a straight answer, including when the answer is that you should look one station further out.

FAQ: Average Salary in Japan

What is the average salary in Japan?

¥4,775,000 a year before tax, covering 2024 income, from the National Tax Agency's Private Sector Salary Survey. Men averaged ¥5,867,000 and women ¥3,332,000.

What is the average salary in Japan per month?

¥340,600 in contractual monthly pay as of June 2025, excluding overtime and bonuses. That is not the annual figure divided by twelve, because the annual figure includes bonuses.

What is the minimum salary in Japan per month?

Japan sets a minimum hourly wage, not a monthly one. At Tokyo's current ¥1,226 an hour, full-time work comes to roughly ¥212,500 a month gross. The national weighted average minimum wage is ¥1,121.

What is a good salary in Japan?

Anything above ¥5m puts you in the top third of earners, and above ¥8m puts you in the top 12%. In Tokyo specifically, ¥5m to ¥6m is where renting an average apartment stops requiring compromises.

Is the average salary in Japan rising?

Yes. It rose 3.9% in the most recent survey and has increased four years running. The 2026 spring wage round delivered 5.01%, the third consecutive year above 5%, and real wages have beaten inflation for six straight months.

What is the median salary in Japan?

Japan does not publish an official median individual salary. Median household income was ¥4,510,000 against a mean of ¥5,752,000. For individuals, the largest income band is ¥3m to ¥4m and 48.1% of workers earn under ¥4m.

What is the average salary in Tokyo?

¥418,300 a month in contractual pay, the highest of any prefecture and 22.8% above the national average of ¥340,600.

How much is the average salary in Japan in USD?

We quote figures in yen only, because the yen conversion has moved enough in recent years that any dollar figure dates within months. Convert at the rate on the day you need it.

What is the average IT salary in Japan?

The information and communications sector, which covers software, telecoms and IT services, averaged ¥6,595,000 a year, running 38% above the national average.

Which industry pays the most in Japan?

Electricity, gas, heat supply and water, at ¥8,324,000 a year. Finance and insurance is second at ¥7,023,000 and information and communications third at ¥6,595,000.

Do foreigners earn less than Japanese workers in Japan?

Foreign workers averaged ¥254,300 a month against ¥340,600 for all workers, but foreign workers are also much younger with far shorter tenure, which explains a large share of the gap in a seniority-weighted pay system. For visa holders on the Engineer/Specialist route, employers are legally required to pay at least what a Japanese national would receive for the same work.

Which job has the highest salary in Japan for foreigners?

Professional and technical visa holders average ¥313,200 a month, the highest of any foreign worker category, and within that, roles in information and communications and in finance pay the most. Business-level Japanese widens the range of roles available considerably.

Is 12 million yen a good salary in Japan?

Yes, comfortably. It puts you inside the top 6.2% of earners, which is everyone above ¥10m. Expect a take-home ratio somewhere near 70%.

What is a salaryman in Japan?

A salaryman (サラリーマン) is a white-collar permanent employee at a company, the 正社員 category that averaged ¥5,449,000 in 2024. The term carries connotations of long tenure, seniority-based pay and company loyalty.

How much do you need to earn to rent in Tokyo?

Landlords typically want monthly income of at least three times the rent. Average rent for a small 23-ward apartment was ¥114,242 in June 2026, which implies roughly ¥4,110,000 a year on the gross measure, or closer to ¥5,300,000 if the calculation is run on take-home pay.

What is the gender pay gap in Japan?

Women earn 76.6% of what men earn on contractual monthly pay. That is the narrowest gap since records began in 1976, and still well behind the OECD average of 88.7 on the comparable measure, where Japan sits at 78.0.