Fujitsu stopped setting graduate pay by degree

In Japan, a new graduate's first salary is set mostly by which degree they hold. Fujitsu stopped doing that with its April 2026 intake. The lesson for foreign companies hiring graduates in Japan is less about pay than about something that has to exist before pay: a written definition of each entry-level role.

What Fujitsu changed

From the April 2026 intake, Fujitsu sets new graduates' starting pay by the job they take and its level of responsibility, instead of one flat amount per degree. The company announced this on June 21, 2024. Until then, a master's graduate got one number and a bachelor's graduate got another. Now two people from the same university, joining the same year, can be paid differently because they took different jobs.

Fujitsu hasn't published a full pay table. Kyodo News reported in June 2024 that starting pay for jobs needing advanced expertise could exceed ¥400,000 a month. Business Journal reported that the old flat starting pay was in the upper ¥200,000s. So the gap inside one graduate cohort could run to well over ¥100,000 a month.

Fujitsu also expanded paid internships of one to six months, working on real projects alongside in-house experts. Keep that detail in mind. It matters more than it looks.

Graduates came last, after six years

The graduate change was the last step of a rollout that started in 2020. Fujitsu moved about 15,000 managers to job-based HR management in April 2020 and about 45,000 general employees in April 2022, according to IT Leaders. New graduates were the one entry point still outside the system.

In 2025 the company went further and effectively ended Japan's traditional once-a-year batch hiring of graduates. It now recruits year-round by job type, and it no longer matters whether a candidate is a new graduate or mid-career. Fujitsu's chief HR officer told Business Insider Japan that planning hires by estimating retirements and backfilling no longer works, and that the company should "hire the people it needs when it needs them." In an interview first published in January 2026, CEO Takahito Tokita said hiring authority had been handed to the business divisions, and that a business built on headcount "won't last."

I think the order matters. Fujitsu ran job descriptions and grades with managers first, then general staff, and only then tried to price people with no work history. Had it started with graduates, I suspect it would have stalled in year one. Most companies cannot describe every graduate placement as a defined job.

Most Japanese starting pay is still set by degree

At most Japanese companies, graduate starting pay is still one flat amount per education level. The statistics are built that way. Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare reports new graduates' monthly pay for 2025 by degree: ¥299,000 for graduate school, ¥262,300 for university, ¥235,500 for technical or junior college, ¥207,300 for high school. A 2026 survey of 205 Prime-listed companies by the Institute of Labor Administration records the flat rate for university graduates at ¥265,708.

Japanese starting pay is set by degree. Fujitsu sets it by job, and reports say it can pass ¥400,000

Monthly pay of new graduates by education (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Basic Survey on Wage Structure, 2025) and reported starting pay at Fujitsu from the April 2026 intake (Kyodo News, June 2024). Bars are scaled to ¥450,000

Flat by degree　labor ministry, 2025

• High school
  ¥207k
• Technical / junior college
  ¥236k
• University
  ¥262k
• Graduate school
  ¥299k

Set by job　Fujitsu, from April 2026

• Jobs needing advanced expertisereported
  ¥400k+

Same degree, different job, different pay. That only works if every entry-level role is written down.

The amounts are rising. The method isn't. In Keidanren's 2025 survey of its members, 95.5% had raised starting pay in the past three years, and the top reason was securing talent, at 83.4%. But 38.7% said they also raised existing employees' pay and the gap with new hires still narrowed. When everyone competes on one flat number, the third-year employee and the new hire drift closer together. The flat system is causing that strain.

Claims of "job-based" adoption deserve a discount too. In the same survey, 26.4% of companies said they had introduced job-based employment or were planning or considering it. Of those, only 22.9% applied it to all employees. Multiply roughly and you get a single-digit share, and that still counts companies only planning it. I went through those numbers in Japan's job-based pay: how many companies really do it.

What has to exist before job-based starting pay?

A job definition and a grade have to exist before the pay table. If you can't say which work sits at which level, the number has nothing under it. At Fujitsu, that foundation was job descriptions and its own grade system, called FUJITSU Level, run for managers since 2020 and for general staff since 2022.

Skip that step and change only the pay table, and you get reverse engineering. You want to offer a strong student more money, so you give them a higher grade. The grade becomes the result of a negotiation. My own order is: check fit, set the grade, add allowances for the role's responsibilities, and only then show the amount. I laid out the method in three pay tracks. Talk money first and the grade gets written afterward to match.

It also helps to score the role before you score anyone for it. A role with fragmented work, no decisions of its own and no feedback will lose people whoever you hire (Score the role before you score the person). Entry-level "jobs" tend to score low on exactly those points.

If you hire graduates in Japan

Write out each graduate role before you call your system job-based. A global grade framework at headquarters doesn't help if your Japan entity's graduate openings still read "sales assistant" or "engineer, team to be decided."

Japanese graduates are used to not knowing their placement. They expect the company to decide. If you tell them "this job, this level, this pay," you are also promising the job won't quietly change after they join. If you move them, does the pay move? Can it go down? If you can't answer, what you have is flat starting pay with a job-based label on it.

If you can answer, it's an advantage. You can justify a higher number by the work, which means you don't have to outbid large Japanese employers on one flat figure. A careers page that says what the role does and how much it owns will attract better-fitting people than one that leads with a big salary.

The part I still can't fully answer is how you assign a level to someone with no work history. A mid-career hire brings evidence. A graduate brings very little. Fujitsu's one-to-six-month paid internships look like its answer: do real work together first, and you have something to grade. Paying ¥400,000 on the strength of an interview alone is risky for both sides.

Count how many of your graduate roles in Japan you could describe as a real job today. That count says more about your readiness for job-based pay than any salary table.

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