What a Japanese salary actually pays you
Type in the offer. YenTake shows every month from the one you arrive in — including the resident tax that appears out of nowhere in the June after your first calendar year here, the bonus months that are taxed on their own rules, and the December payslip that gives some of the year’s income tax back. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
What this assumes. You are an employee (給与所得者) of one Japanese company, on the national health insurance association for employees (協会けんぽ) rather than a company health society, and you filed the 扶養控除等申告書 your employer asked for. You become a Japanese tax resident when you arrive. Income arising outside Japan is not included — a non-permanent resident (非永住者) is taxed on foreign-source income only once it is paid in or remitted to Japan, and that is its own question. Resident tax is charged on the previous calendar year and varies between municipalities by a few hundred yen in the flat part. This is an estimate, not advice: for anything that matters, check with a 税理士 (licensed tax accountant).
The offer
Figures update as you type.
Year by year
Twelve-month windows counted from the month you arrive.
Month by month
A bonus month
A bonus is insured and taxed on rules of its own.
Your payslip, line by line
What each line of a 給与明細書 says, and what it is.
Compare up to three offers
Everything else — age, prefecture, dependents — comes from the form above.
How this is worked out
Every month: social insurance, then income tax
Health insurance and the employees’ pension are not a percentage of your salary. They are a percentage of a grade (標準報酬月額) that your salary falls into — 50 grades from ¥58,000 to ¥1,390,000 for health, 32 from ¥88,000 to ¥650,000 for pension. You pay half of the premium and your employer pays the other half. In the real world the grade is fixed once a year from your April–June average and then left alone; this page reads it from the salary you typed, which is the same thing for a steady salary.
One thing that is true of the payslip but not of this page: most employers collect the insurance for a month out of the following month’s pay, so your very first payslip in Japan often has no insurance deducted at all and the second has a normal month’s worth. Over a career it comes to the same premiums, but it is not free of consequence here. It moves a whole month of insurance out of your first calendar year — on a ¥300,000 salary that is about ¥44,000 of cash you keep that year and this page shows as deducted — and because that month of insurance is no longer deducted in that year, the December calculation and the following year’s resident tax both move a little the other way. Treat the first year’s deductions here as a month heavier than they will be.
Income tax is then withheld from what is left, using the national monthly table (源泉徴収税額表 月額表, 甲欄) and the number of dependents you declared. It is only an estimate all year: nobody knows in January what your December will look like. Above ¥740,000 a month after insurance the printed table stops giving figures and gives a formula of its own; this page uses a different one, 電子計算機等を使用して源泉徴収税額を計算する方法, which the law provides for payroll systems and which most of them use. Both are correct and they do not always agree — on the National Tax Agency’s own worked example they are ¥7 apart. Below ¥740,000 the two can differ by a few hundred yen instead, because each row of the table is flat while the calculation climbs through it. December settles all of it.
December: the year is corrected
At the last payday of the year your employer runs 年末調整 — the real tax for the year, against everything already withheld. If you arrived partway through the year you will usually get a noticeable amount back, because the monthly table assumed twelve months of that salary and you were only paid for part of it. In 2026 there is a second reason: the deductions were raised by a law that takes effect on 1 December 2026, so the tables used from January to November are the old ones and the correction is unusually large.
The June after your first calendar year: resident tax
Resident tax (住民税) is about 10% of your income plus a flat part of roughly ¥5,000 a year — and it is charged on the previous calendar year, collected in twelve instalments from June to the following May, by the municipality you lived in on 1 January. (If the whole year’s bill is no more than the flat part, it comes out of June in one go instead — which is what a very short or very small first year in Japan produces.) So your first months in Japan have none of it, and then it starts — in the June that follows your first 1 January here, which for an April arrival is fourteen months in and for a September arrival is nine. The timeline above marks the month. The cliff is real, and it is the single most common surprise for people who have just moved. There is a longer explanation in why your Japanese tax goes up in your second year.
Bonuses
A bonus is insured on 標準賞与額 — the amount with anything under ¥1,000 dropped — capped at ¥5,730,000 a fiscal year for health insurance and ¥1,500,000 a month for pension. Its income tax uses a different table again: a rate chosen by last month’s salary after social insurance. A first bonus with no previous month of salary behind it falls under a separate rule in the Income Tax Act (第186条第2項) and is handled here too. This page takes one bonus per month — two in the same month are withheld differently depending on whether they are one bonus in instalments or two bonuses, and it does not ask you which.
What changed for 2026
The 2026 tax reform (令和8年度税制改正) raised two of the deductions that everyone gets. The basic deduction is ¥1,040,000 for total income up to ¥4,890,000 — up from ¥580,000 before the 2025 and 2026 reforms — and the floor of the employment income deduction is ¥740,000 for 2026 and 2027. The income threshold for counting somebody as a dependent rose to ¥620,000 of income, which is ¥1,360,000 of salary. A 19 to 22 year old earning more than that no longer falls off a cliff: the new 特定親族特別控除 tapers away up to ¥1,230,000 of their income. The changes take effect for salaries paid on or after 1 December 2026, which is why the December payslip does the work.
What this does not do
- Company health societies (健康保険組合) and public-sector mutual aid (共済組合) have their own rates. This uses 協会けんぽ.
- Deductions you claim yourself: life insurance, iDeCo, a housing loan credit, medical expenses, 寄附金 including ふるさと納税. All of them reduce the tax below what is shown.
- Foreign-source income, a second employer, and salary over ¥20,000,000 a year, which is outside 年末調整 and needs a tax return of your own. (The 2.1% 復興特別所得税 surcharge on the income tax is included — it is part of the figures, not one of the gaps.)
- Every year in the timeline is computed with the 2026 rules. The National Tax Agency has since published the 2027 withholding tables and this page does not use them yet; the insurance rates for 2027 are genuinely not out, as they are set each February. The annual totals for 2027 are unaffected — the deductions are the same for 2026 and 2027 — but the December correction shown from 2027 on is larger here than it will be in reality, because by then the amended monthly table will already be in use. From 2028 the basic deduction and the floor of the employment income deduction are both legislated to change again, and those years are computed as though they had not.
- The resident-tax exemption for a low-income household uses the thresholds of a 1級地 municipality — Tokyo’s wards, the big cities and most commutable suburbs. Somewhere in a 2級地 or 3級地 they are a little lower. The extra exemptions for a person with a disability, a widow, a single parent or somebody under 20 are not modelled.
- Insurance rates change in March and April, so a timeline that starts in January, February or March of 2026 uses that April’s rates for those months rather than the previous year’s. It is a few hundred yen a month, in those months only.
Sources
- National Tax Agency — 令和8年分 源泉徴収税額表 (the monthly withholding table, the bonus rate table, and the computer-calculation method)
- National Tax Agency — 令和8年度税制改正による所得税の基礎控除の引上げ等について
- Japan Health Insurance Association — 令和8年度の都道府県単位保険料率 and the per-prefecture 保険料額表
- Japan Pension Service — 令和8年度 厚生年金保険料額表 (18.3%)
- Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare — 令和8年度 雇用保険料率 (0.5% for an employee in an ordinary business)
- Local Tax Act (地方税法) 第39条・第318条 on the 1 January assessment date, and 第321条の5 on collection from June
Every rate above was read from the primary source, and the test suite in this repository pins seventy-seven figures taken straight from the published premium and withholding tables, so a wrong edit fails loudly rather than quietly. Even so: this is a calculator, not tax advice. A 税理士 is the person to ask.