Average Salary in Japan: 2025 Data from the National Tax Agency, Explained

Data year: 2025 (published September 2026) | Last checked: October 3, 2026 | Understand Japan | Japanese Best

Japan’s National Tax Agency (NTA) publishes the country’s main official salary statistic every September: the Survey on Private Sector Salaries (民間給与実態統計調査). The latest release covers 2025. This page sets out what the headline average does and does not measure, breaks it down by employment type, gender, age and industry, and then turns it into an approximate take-home figure to compare with rents.

The headline number: ¥4.87 million

For people employed in the private sector for the whole of 2025, the average annual salary (including bonuses) was ¥4.87 million, up 1.9% on 2024. The NTA describes it as the fifth consecutive rise and the highest on record. The agency also notes that the estimation method changed after 2013, so very old years are not strictly comparable. The average bonus within that total was about ¥750,000.

This is a mean across 51.63 million people of all ages, industries and employment types, including part-time and contract workers. This survey does not publish a median. The most common salary band was ¥4–5 million for men (16.6% of men) and ¥2–3 million for women (18.7% of women), which shows how far the single average can be from a typical person.

By employment type and gender

Regular employees earned about 2.7 times as much as non-regular employees on average, and men about 1.75 times as much as women (our calculations). These two gaps overlap, so read them together rather than as two separate effects.

By age

Average salary by age group for people employed all year in 2025 (NTA Table 10, all establishment sizes):

What the table shows: men’s average salary rises with age to a peak at 55–59. Women’s average stays between about ¥3.6 million and ¥3.8 million from the late twenties to the late fifties.

By industry

The highest-paying industry average is about 3.1 times the lowest (our calculation). Each industry average mixes regular and non-regular workers, so the gaps between industries reflect the mix of employment types as well as pay rates.

Did pay keep up with prices?

Nominal average salary rose 1.9% in 2025. Japan’s consumer price index (all items) rose 3.2% over 2025 as an annual average (Statistics Bureau). On these two figures, the average salary rose less than prices.

What it means if you want to live in Japan: approximate take-home pay

Below is our own approximate calculation, using 2025 rules, for a single employee under 40 with no dependants who is enrolled in Japan Health Insurance Association (Kyōkai Kenpo) coverage in Tokyo. Employee contributions: health insurance 4.955% (half of 9.91%), employees’ pension 9.15% (half of 18.3%) and employment insurance 0.55%. Income tax uses the 2025 employment-income deduction, the 2025 basic deduction and the national tax table, plus the 2.1% reconstruction surtax. Resident tax uses the standard 10% rate after a ¥430,000 basic deduction, plus ¥5,000 in flat-rate amounts. Contributions are applied to gross pay (no rounding to standard monthly remuneration), and smaller credits are ignored. Expect your own figure to differ by tens of thousands of yen.

Compared with rent: the 2023 Housing and Land Survey puts the average monthly rent actually paid in Tokyo’s 23 wards at ¥94,853 (all home sizes). That is about 30% of the monthly take-home at the ¥4.87 million average, and about 26% at the regular-employee average. In Yokohama City (average ¥75,381) the same shares are about 24% and 21% (our calculations). Two cautions: the rent averages include long-standing tenancies, and resident tax in Japan is charged the year after the income is earned, so in your first year in Japan your actual deductions may be lower than shown.

For rent levels by ward and the costs of signing a lease, see our Tokyo rent guide. For one city in detail, see living in Yokohama.

Sources

• National Tax Agency — 2025 Survey on Private Sector Salaries, summary and press release (September 2026, PDF, incl. industry table)
• National Tax Agency — 2025 statistical tables (Table 10: by age)
• Statistics Bureau of Japan — Consumer Price Index, 2025 annual average (published January 23, 2026)
• Take-home inputs: NTA No.1410 (employment income deduction) · NTA No.1199 (basic deduction) · NTA No.2260 (income tax rates) · Kyōkai Kenpo FY2025 rates · Japan Pension Service (18.3%) · MHLW employment insurance rates FY2025 (PDF) · Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications — resident tax
• Statistics Bureau / e-Stat — 2023 Housing and Land Survey, Table 112-3 (rent)