Foreign Workers in Japan Earn 25% Below the Overall Average

Foreign workers in Japan earn 25% less than the average full-time worker, and that average includes the foreigners themselves. The number is real, and it comes from the government's own 2025 wage survey. The usual conclusion, that foreigners are cheaper to hire, does not follow from it. Split the average by visa category and set each group next to workers of similar age and tenure, and for white-collar foreigners the gap shrinks to under ¥1,000 a month. That is a rough comparison, with industry and education left unmatched.

Who is counted in the 25%?

The figure covers scheduled monthly pay for full-time workers at private establishments with 10 or more regular employees, for the single month of June 2025. The source is the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare's Basic Survey on Wage Structure for 2025, published on March 24, 2026. It sampled 79,321 establishments and got valid answers from 59,836.

A few definitions matter. Scheduled pay is the pre-tax monthly wage without overtime and without bonuses. Only full-time workers are in it, so foreign students with part-time jobs are mostly outside. Special permanent residents and diplomats are excluded from the foreign group. The comparison figure, ¥340,600, is the average for all full-time workers, foreigners included. The survey does not publish a Japanese-only average.

The foreign average is ¥254,300. Divide one by the other and you get 74.7%, a gap of ¥86,300 a month.

The spread inside the foreign group is bigger than the gap

The same survey reports pay by residence status, and the categories sit far apart. Professional and technical statuses (excluding Specified Skilled Worker) average ¥313,200. This is the white-collar group: Engineer/Specialist in Humanities/International Services, Highly Skilled Professional and similar. Status-based residents, meaning permanent residents, long-term residents and spouses of Japanese nationals, average ¥311,100. Specified Skilled Workers average ¥221,400. Technical intern trainees average ¥190,300.

Top to bottom, that is ¥122,900. So "the foreign average" is software engineers and factory trainees averaged together. It is a correct average and a useless price.

Foreign workers average 25% less than all full-time workers, but professional-status foreigners earn what all workers aged 30 to 34 earn

Scheduled monthly pay of full-time workers, thousand yen, June 2025, private establishments with 10 or more regular employees. Bar length uses ¥400,000 as 100%. MHLW Basic Survey on Wage Structure 2025

All full-time workers　Japanese and foreign

• All ages44.4 yrs old, 12.7 yrs tenure
  340.6
• Aged 30 to 34
  312.3

Foreign workers　by residence status

• Professional and technical32.4 yrs old, 3.2 yrs tenure
  313.2
• Status-based residents45.0 yrs old, 6.5 yrs tenure
  311.1
• All foreign workers32.5 yrs old, 3.3 yrs tenure
  254.3
• Specified Skilled Worker29.5 yrs old, 2.4 yrs tenure
  221.4
• Technical intern training26.2 yrs old, 1.7 yrs tenure
  190.3

The gap comes from who is inside the average. For the same age band and the same kind of work, there is one price.

What is left after you match age and tenure?

For white-collar foreigners, on the published averages, under ¥1,000 a month.

Pay in Japan climbs with age and with years at the same employer. In this survey the average full-time worker is 44.4 years old with 12.7 years of tenure. The average foreign worker is 32.5 with 3.3 years. Twelve years younger, nine years less tenure. That alone accounts for a large share of the gap.

Professional-status foreigners average 32.4 years old and ¥313,200. All workers aged 30 to 34 average ¥312,300. The difference is under a thousand yen.

Status-based residents are the interesting case. They average 45.0 years old, and against all workers aged 45 to 49 (¥377,900) they are 18% behind. But their tenure is only 6.5 years, and all workers with 5 to 9 years of tenure average ¥312,500, almost exactly their ¥311,100. They are paid for their tenure and miss the pay that comes with age. A Japanese person who changes employers at 40 runs into the same wall.

A caution. I am placing published averages side by side. Industry, education and company size are uncontrolled, so this is a direction and nothing more precise. The direction is clear enough: match age and tenure and the gap shrinks to very little.

Four in ten are in the two lowest-paid statuses

Most of the remaining gap is the mix of statuses and jobs.

A second ministry survey, the Survey on the Employment of Foreign Workers (as of September 30, 2025, establishments with five or more workers covered by employment insurance, published August 31, 2026), estimates about 2.04 million foreign regular workers. Technical intern trainees are 21.7% of them and Specified Skilled Workers 17.9%, close to 40% together. Engineer/Specialist in Humanities/International Services is 18.5%, Highly Skilled Professional 1.2%, status-based residents 24.0%. By occupation the largest group is production-process workers, at 31.3%.

The same survey gives scheduled pay for full-timers by status: Highly Skilled Professional ¥462,100, permanent residents ¥341,000, Engineer/Specialist ¥308,900, long-term residents ¥229,800, Specified Skilled Worker ¥217,000, technical intern training ¥180,400. Highly Skilled Professionals earn well above the ¥340,600 average for everyone.

So the cheap thing is the job. Four in ten foreign workers are on factory floors, building sites, farms and care homes under trainee and Specified Skilled Worker statuses, and those jobs pay around ¥200,000 whoever does them. I broke down the headcount by nationality and status in Foreign workers in Japan: who the 2.57 million are, and where.

There is no foreigner rate on the pay scale

For white-collar roles the system rules it out first. The Immigration Services Agency's guidance on the Engineer/Specialist in Humanities/International Services status says the person must receive pay equal to or greater than what a Japanese national would receive for the same work. The operating guidelines for Specified Skilled Workers carry a rule to the same effect.

The market says the same thing. Professional-status foreigners are already paid like their age group. Offer 20% under and the candidate very likely has another offer at the normal rate. I can't put a number on how often, but I would plan on it.

When I set pay I keep the pieces apart: grade describes the person's ability and experience, allowances attach to the responsibilities of the position, and the bonus follows the period's results. That is the approach in Three-track pay: set grade, allowance and bonus separately. Nationality is on none of those tracks. If a role really needs a language, write the language into the role as a responsibility and pay for that.

Two things these surveys cannot tell you. Bonuses sit outside scheduled pay, and the bonus gap may be wider than the monthly one: annual bonuses averaged ¥412,900 for Engineer/Specialist holders and ¥63,600 for trainees in the second survey. And neither survey shows whether a foreigner and a Japanese colleague in the same position at the same company are paid the same. Only a company's own payroll shows that.

The mistake also runs the other way. A foreign engineer who asks for ¥310,000 looks expensive if ¥254,000 is the number in your head. That engineer is asking for what the age group gets.

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