Frequently asked questions
What comes out of a Japanese salary, why social insurance is set by grade rather than salary, and why resident tax is out of step with this month’s pay — the common questions, answered. The content is still being expanded.
Take-home (手取り) is what you actually receive after social insurance, income tax and resident tax come out of your gross pay (年収). It is not simply “salary minus one tax rate,” because the three deductions are each computed on a different basis — which is what this tool separates out.
Because it is levied on the standard-monthly-remuneration grade (標準報酬月額) your salary maps to, not the raw salary. Health uses a 50-grade table capped at ¥1,390,000; the employees’ pension uses a separate 32-grade table capped at ¥650,000 and truncates at both ends, so it is not a slice of the health table. That is why pension contributions stop growing once your pay passes the grade ceiling.
Because resident tax (住民税) is levied on the prior year’s income and billed by your municipality from June to the following May — it is not withheld from this month’s pay. This tool shows it as a separate estimate beside the breakdown, using your entered income as a proxy for the prior year, rather than folding it into the this-month bar.
A first-year hire with no prior-year income owes ¥0 resident tax, because there is no prior year to assess — a toggle covers that case. But the ¥0 holds only when prior-year income was actually nil; it is not a blanket year-one exemption, and someone who earned in the prior year does owe it.
They are not modelled separately in this version. Bonuses have their own social-insurance and tax treatment, and the annual gross is treated here as twelve equal months, so a bonus-heavy pay mix will differ from what the calculator shows. This is a deliberate v1 scope boundary, disclosed rather than hidden.
A new FY2026 charge (子ども・子育て支援金); the employee share is 0.115%, split 50/50 with the employer and levied on the same grade base. It is collected from the April-2026 payroll onward, so a current calculator that omits it now understates social insurance.
No — it varies by prefecture (Kyōkai Kenpo). The default here is Tokyo, where the employee share is 4.925%. The site deliberately does not name a single “cheapest” prefecture: two readings of the full table disagreed on the lowest, so that remains an open item.
Each figure cites a named primary source (NTA, the Pension Service, Kyōkai Kenpo, MHLW, MIC) and is the one in force for 2026. Two things limit them: a very recent change may not have reached these pages yet, and none has been signed off by the reviewer of record; a few details also rest on paraphrase rather than a verbatim quote. For the amount that binds you, check with your employer or the National Tax Agency.
The content of this page is still being expanded.