Under 40% of Foreign Students Stay to Work in Japan

Most foreign students in Japan do not take a job in Japan when they graduate. The share who do is 38.8%. That is the latest figure from the Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), for about 64,000 students who graduated in the 2024 academic year. Employers who treat international students as a ready pool of bilingual hires are counting everyone enrolled. Fewer than four in ten graduates reach the job market each year, and more than half of those join companies with fewer than 100 people.

Which number is the stay rate?

There are three, and they count different people: 38.8% of all graduates, about 55% once you drop those who continue studying in Japan, and roughly 40,000 work-status approvals a year.

The first comes from JASSO's survey of where international students go after graduating. It covers 64,331 students who finished graduate school, university, junior college, technical college, professional training college or a preparatory course between April 2024 and March 2025. Schools reported their destinations as of October 2025. Remove the 1,493 with unknown destinations and the denominator is 62,838. Of those, 24,353 took jobs in Japan. Japanese-language schools are outside this denominator and reported separately for reference.

The second is the government's own definition. The roadmap of the Cabinet Secretariat's Council for the Creation of Future Education (September 2023) tracks the domestic employment rate of graduating international students, excluding those who go on to further study in Japan. Its baseline is 48% and its target is 60% by 2033. Applying that formula to JASSO's 2024 data myself, 24,353 divided by 43,958 (the 62,838 minus 18,880 who continued studying in Japan) gives 55.4%.

The third is from the Immigration Services Agency, which counts changes from Student and similar statuses to statuses that permit work. In 2025 it processed 42,081 applications and approved 40,501, an approval rate of 96.2%. This is approvals in a calendar year, and it will never match graduates in an academic year. It includes people who went straight from a language school into a job (6,442 in JASSO's reference table), and the agency notes that the education level recorded may be a degree earned at home. Even after adding those, about 10,000 remain that I could not reconcile from the published tables. I'll leave that gap open.

One side note. The visa is not where people are being stopped. In 2019 the approval rate was 79.9%. In 2025 only 1,580 applications were refused.

Under four in ten graduating foreign students take a job in Japan, and three in ten stay on to study

Destinations of 62,838 international students who graduated in academic year 2024 (unknown destinations excluded), %, and domestic employment rate by field of study, %. JASSO survey of international student destinations, published May 2026, Japanese-language schools excluded

Destination after graduation　all levels

• Job in Japan
  38.8%
• Further study in Japan
  30.0%
• In Japan, other
  9.9%
• Home country or regionjob, study and other combined
  19.5%
• Third country
  1.8%

Share taking a job in Japan　by field

• Social sciences
  56.3%
• Engineering
  49.3%
• Humanities
  22.1%

The student population is large. About 40% of each graduating class reaches the job market.

Who hires them?

Small companies, and Tokyo more than anywhere else. In the Immigration Services Agency's 2025 data, among the 25,656 cases that recorded employer size, 40.0% of employers had 1 to 49 employees and another 5.6% reported zero. Employers with 2,000 or more accounted for 12.1%. By capital, 45.9% had ¥10 million or less.

Tokyo took 43.2% of the hires, Osaka 12.1%, Kanagawa 6.1%. The Kanto region as a whole took 60.7%.

By nationality, China accounts for 16,192, almost exactly 40%. Then Vietnam at 6,799, Nepal at 4,546, South Korea at 1,822 and Myanmar at 1,517. China has risen each year since 2023: 13,952, then 14,511, then 16,192. Vietnam was 10,343 in 2023 and has fallen by a third in two years. The release gives no reason and I won't guess one.

The status they move to is overwhelmingly Engineer/Specialist in Humanities/International Services: 31,927 people, 78.8%. Specified Skilled Worker (i) reached 3,386, up from 1,948 in 2023. Highly Skilled Professional was 1,152, up from 218 in 2020.

What jobs do they take?

Translation and interpreting is the largest category at 11.5%. Then administrative management work (excluding company executives) at 9.9%, information processing and communications technology at 8.9%, overseas trade at 4.5%, corporate sales at 4.3%, planning and marketing at 3.9%, and technical development in machinery at 3.0%. "Other" is 36.7%.

Apply the 8.9% to the 39,621 cases that recorded a job type and you get about 3,500 people a year in IT roles. That multiplication is mine. The release does not print a headcount.

From the supply side, JASSO counts 11,293 international students who graduated in engineering in academic year 2024. Of the 10,947 whose destination is known, 5,397 took jobs in Japan, or 49.3%.

People often call international students Japan's biggest pipeline of foreign engineers. In numbers, it is a little over 3,000 IT hires and a little over 1,000 machinery engineers out of 40,000 approvals. That is a real pipeline. It is also a tenth of what the headline suggests.

Two in three start under ¥250,000 a month

The agency sorts monthly pay into bands (40,369 cases recorded it). The biggest band is ¥200,000 to under ¥250,000, at 47.0%. Under ¥200,000 is 18.7%. From ¥250,000 to under ¥300,000 is 22.3%. Everything from ¥300,000 up totals 12.0%, and ¥500,000 or more is 1.5%.

Compare the going rate for Japanese new graduates. In the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare's Basic Survey on Wage Structure for 2025, scheduled monthly pay for new graduates was ¥262,300 for university, ¥299,000 for graduate school and ¥230,700 for professional training college. The definitions may not match, since the immigration release does not say whether allowances are included, so this is a rough comparison. Roughly, then, former students are paid the Japanese new-graduate rate. A quarter of them (25.0%) list a professional training college as their highest education, 42.6% university and 25.3% graduate school, and against that mix the distribution looks neither low nor high.

What the pool looks like from the hiring side

It is a new-graduate market. The price is the new-graduate price and so is the readiness. A company hoping to fill experienced roles from it will probably be disappointed. But 12% already start at ¥300,000 or more, which tells you some employers are bidding for part of this pool on different terms.

Large companies take about one hire in eight. Big Japanese employers start new-graduate selection early and run it almost entirely in Japanese. That is the general pattern, and I have no figure for how many international students it screens out. For a small foreign subsidiary the useful point is that nearly half the competitors for these graduates are firms with fewer than 50 people. For the Japanese side of the graduate market, see Japan's 98% graduate employment rate: check the denominator.

Three in ten are not on the market this year because they are still in school in Japan: 40.9% of professional training college graduates and 24.0% of undergraduates go on to further study. Further upstream, Japanese-language schools graduate 65,489 students a year and 78.1% of them continue studying in Japan. These people arrive two or three years later. On a talent map they belong in the "later" column.

If you need Chinese speakers, the 40% Chinese share is a dependable entry point of about 16,000 people a year. For how all foreign workers in Japan divide by nationality, see Foreign workers in Japan: who the 2.57 million are, and where.

The government wants 60% by 2033, and by its own definition 2024 was already around 55%. Measured against all graduates the rate is still under 40%, and more than 12,000 a year graduate and go home. The tables do not show whether they never meant to stay or wanted to and found nothing. Until someone counts that, I would not read the 60% target as saying much about how many people a given employer can hire.

---