Japan Take-Home Pay Calculator (Tedori)

Take-home pay in Japan, often called 手取 (tedori), is noticeably lower than the gross annual salary written in an employment contract. Every month, four mandatory social insurance premiums are deducted, along with withheld income tax, and once a year resident tax based on the previous year's income joins them. This calculator estimates that full stack of deductions using rates confirmed against Japan's official bodies — the Japan Pension Service, the Japan Health Insurance Association (Kyokai Kenpo), the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the National Tax Agency, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government — as of August 2026.

How the four premiums are deducted

The four social insurance premiums work differently from each other. Employees’ Pension (厚生年金) takes 9.15% of a monthly compensation base that is capped between 88,000 and 650,000 yen, a rate unchanged since September 2017. Health Insurance under Kyokai Kenpo is prefecture-specific — this calculator includes the confirmed 2026 rate for all 47 prefectures, applied to a compensation base capped between 58,000 and 1,390,000 yen (a wider band than the pension cap, since health insurance uses its own grade table). Long-Term Care Insurance adds a flat 1.62% nationwide on top of that same base, but only for employees aged 40 to 64. Employment Insurance takes 0.5% of your full monthly pay for most office and service jobs, or 0.6% for agriculture, forestry, fisheries, sake brewing, or construction — and unlike the other three, it has no cap at all.

How income tax is withheld

Income tax is calculated here using an approach different from the Korean version of this calculator: rather than reconstructing an annual tax chain, this tool uses the exact formula the National Tax Agency itself publishes for payroll software — the "electronic calculation method" for the monthly withholding table (column A). That formula already bakes in the 2.1% reconstruction surtax into its rates (for example, the lowest bracket is 5.105%, not a plain 5%), and it already reflects the 2025 tax reform that raised the minimum salary income deduction from 550,000 to 650,000 yen. Because this is the same method payroll systems use for monthly withholding, it should track real paychecks closely — though it is still a monthly estimate, and any gap is reconciled in December through the year-end adjustment (年末調整), which this calculator does not perform.

Why resident tax lags a year behind

Resident tax (住民税) is the part most people find confusing, and for good reason: it is based on last year's income, not this year's. Someone starting their first job in Japan pays no resident tax at all for their first year of employment, because there was no income in the relevant prior year — this calculator reproduces that by asking for last year's salary separately and correctly returning zero resident tax when you enter zero there. When resident tax does apply, it combines a 10% income-based portion (所得割) with a flat 5,000 yen per year per-capita portion (均等割, which itself is made up of a prefectural tax, a municipal tax, and a national forest environment tax collected alongside it). Resident tax uses its own basic deduction of 430,000 yen and its own dependent deduction of 330,000 yen per person — both lower than the equivalent income tax deductions, an intentional difference set by Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications rather than a mistake.

Limits of this calculator

A few limitations are worth keeping in mind. This calculator only covers Kyokai Kenpo (the health insurance association most small and mid-size employers use) — company-run health insurance unions (組合健保), common at large employers, set their own rates. It does not include a small resident-tax credit called 調整控除 that reconciles gaps between national and local deductions, typically worth around 2,500 yen a year, because a full official formula could not be confirmed. It also does not apply municipal low-income exemptions for the flat portion of resident tax below the exact zero-income case, or the new child-support levy (Kodomo Kosodate Shien-kin, roughly 0.115% from the employee starting April 2026) that sits alongside health insurance premiums but is not one of the four core social insurance programs — all of these are left out rather than guessed at.