---
title: Only 22% of Japan's New Hires Plan to Stay Until Retirement
description: In Mynavi's 2025 survey of 800 new graduates in Japan, 22.4% plan to stay until retirement and 21.1% expect to leave within three years. Design jobs for that.
image: https://nobusato.jp/hubfs/covers-2026-10/new-hires-stay-until-retirement-22-percent-cover-en-2026-10.png
---

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Japan by the Numbers

In this article

1. [Who was asked, and how](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/new-hires-stay-until-retirement-22-percent#s1)
2. [Have they given up on being employees?](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/new-hires-stay-until-retirement-22-percent#s2)
3. [Who expects to leave early?](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/new-hires-stay-until-retirement-22-percent#s3)
4. [Design the job for someone who may leave in three years](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/new-hires-stay-until-retirement-22-percent#s4)

1. [Home](https://nobusato.jp/en?hsLang=en)
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3. [Japan by the Numbers](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/tag/japan-by-the-numbers)

# Only 22% of Japan's New Hires Plan to Stay Until Retirement

Mynavi Tenshoku new employee survey 2025

[Nobu Sato](https://nobusato.jp/en/profile?hsLang=en)7 min read

Contents4

1. [Who was asked, and how](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/new-hires-stay-until-retirement-22-percent#s1)
2. [Have they given up on being employees?](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/new-hires-stay-until-retirement-22-percent#s2)
3. [Who expects to leave early?](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/new-hires-stay-until-retirement-22-percent#s3)
4. [Design the job for someone who may leave in three years](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/new-hires-stay-until-retirement-22-percent#s4)

Japan is supposed to be the country where you join a company at 22 and leave at 60. The 22-year-olds no longer plan it that way. In June 2025 the job site Mynavi Tenshoku asked 800 new graduates, three months into their first job, how long they expected to stay. 22.4% said until retirement. 21.1% said three years or less. A graduate hiring system built on the first answer is now getting the second one just as often.

## Who was asked, and how

The respondents are 800 full-time regular employees aged 22 or 23 who graduated in 2025 and started work that April. The survey is Mynavi Tenshoku's New Employee Attitude Survey 2025 (新入社員の意識調査), run online from 20 to 23 June 2025 across Japan, with 400 men and 400 women.

A few limits follow from that. The age band means these are mostly people who went straight from a four-year degree into work. Master's graduates and high-school leavers are not in it. The even split by sex is a quota, so it does not mirror the real intake. And the timing is the third month on the job, when a new hire still knows little about the company.

The question was single-choice: how many years do you think you will work at your current company? The full distribution: three years or less, 21.1%. Four to about ten years, 27.6%. More than ten years but short of retirement, 9.6%. More than ten years and wanting to stay until retirement, 22.4%. Don't know, 19.3%.

A second survey asks it differently. Every year in the first week of April, the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry polls the new hires attending its induction training. In fiscal 2026, 858 of 930 answered. Asked how long they want to work at their employer, 25.6% said until retirement and 36.0% had not thought about it. The other 38.4% expect to leave at some point, to change jobs, go independent or because of life events. According to the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training, the same question in fiscal 2015 got 36.3% for until retirement.

Different samples, different wording, same place: a little over one new hire in five expects to finish a career at the first employer.

## Have they given up on being employees?

No. The same Mynavi survey asked about the career people want. 65.6% chose being a company employee until retirement age: 48.1% with promotion into management, 17.5% without. 17.9% wanted to work flexibly without being tied to employee status, and 3.8% wanted to start a business.

Put the two numbers side by side. Two in three plan to be employees for life. One in five plans to do it here. They have nothing against employment. They have just stopped attaching it to one company.

22% of new hires want to stay until retirement, about as many as expect to leave within three years

"How many years do you think you will work at your current company?", single choice, %. Mynavi Tenshoku, New Employee Attitude Survey 2025; 800 regular employees aged 22 to 23 who joined in April 2025, surveyed June 2025

**All respondents**　800 people

- 3 years or less

  21.1%
- 4 to about 10 years

  27.6%
- Over 10 yearsnot to retirement

  9.6%
- Until retirement

  22.4%
- Don't know

  19.3%

**Share answering "3 years or less"**　by current monthly pay

- ¥210,000 or less

  29.3%
- ¥220,000 to ¥249,999

  19.2%
- ¥250,000 to ¥309,999

  14.4%

Most new hires are not counting in decades. Design the job as if they may be gone in three years.

Figure 1. In Mynavi Tenshoku's June 2025 survey of 800 new graduates in Japan, 22.4% wanted to stay at their current company until retirement and 21.1% expected to leave within three years; among those earning 210,000 yen a month or less, 29.3% said three years or less, against 14.4% of those earning in the 250,000s to 300,000s.

## Who expects to leave early?

Lower-paid new hires, and women. By current monthly pay, 29.3% of those earning 210,000 yen or less said three years or less. In the 220,000s to 240,000s it was 19.2%, and in the 250,000s to 300,000s 14.4%. Wanting to stay until retirement runs the other way: 19.0%, 23.8% and 26.1%.

By sex, 14.8% of men and 27.7% of women said three years or less (the survey's web page says 27.5% for women, but the items in the full results table add up to 27.7%, so I use the table), and 26.5% of men and 18.3% of women wanted to stay until retirement. Among women who said three years or less, the most common reason, with multiple answers allowed, was wanting to change how they work as their life stage changes, at 35.0%. For men it was wanting to build experience at different companies, at 30.6%.

It would be a mistake to read this as "raise starting pay by 40,000 yen and early leavers halve." Companies that pay more at entry differ in industry, size and type of work. One thing is clear, though. Three months in, a real share of new hires are already thinking in three-year units, and they cluster at the low end of starting pay.

## Design the job for someone who may leave in three years

I would treat this fifth as a design constraint. It is an estimate people made in their third month, and a speech at the entrance ceremony will not move it. What the company can change is the job.

Start with payback. If the training plan lets someone own work independently only in year three, the people planning to leave within three years go before the company gets anything back. What I would do is carve out work that can be delivered in year one, and let the new hire be responsible for a result, even a small one.

Then ask where the knowledge lives. If the customer history, the procedures and the past mistakes exist only in one person's head, they leave with that person. In my view, handover notes written as part of ordinary work are worth more than notes written in the last two weeks.

I would also match the timing of rewards. Japanese companies have long stacked the benefits at the back: the longer you stay, the more you get. Someone who says three or five years is not going to stay for a benefit that arrives in year fifteen. Fujitsu stopped setting graduate starting pay by degree for the April 2026 intake and now sets it by role, which I covered in [Fujitsu stopped setting graduate pay by degree](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/fujitsu-job-based-new-graduates?hsLang=en). That is one way of moving money forward.

And I would put year three on the calendar. Waiting for the resignation letter is one option. The other is to make the third year a scheduled conversation about what paths exist from here and what each one requires. My guess is that a company that can spell this out keeps some of the 19.3% who answered "don't know." That is a guess. The survey has no such number.

A foreign subsidiary in Japan that hires no graduates at all is still affected by this number. The people who answered "three years or less" this year are the junior candidates on the market three years from now. What they bring with them depends on how their first employer used those three years.

Intentions are not behavior. How many graduates actually leave, and from which industries, is in [Japan's 3-Year Graduate Turnover, Taken Apart](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/japan-graduate-turnover-3-years?hsLang=en), and where the expectation of a job for life came from is in [Lifetime Employment Is Not a Japanese Tradition](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/lifetime-employment-is-not-tradition?hsLang=en). Some who said three years will stay, and some who said forever will go. The planning assumption is the part worth changing. Companies tend to budget a graduate over ten years, and only about a third of graduates say ten years or more.

Sources (as of November 2026)

- [Mynavi Tenshoku, New Employee Attitude Survey 2025 (29 August 2025)](https://tenshoku.mynavi.jp/knowhow/careertrend/24/)
- [Same survey, full results PDF (Q5 future career, Q17 expected years at current company)](https://prod-cf-static-2025.satellite.tenshoku.mynavi.jp/knowhow/careertrend/pdf/crt24_survey.pdf)
- [Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry, New Employee Survey, fiscal 2026 (22 April 2026)](https://www.tokyo-cci.or.jp/page.jsp?id=1209339)
- [Same survey, results PDF (how long respondents want to work at their employer, fiscal 2022 to 2026)](https://www.tokyo-cci.or.jp/file.jsp?id=1209343)
- [Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training, Business Labor Trend, June 2025 (fiscal 2015 figures from the Tokyo Chamber survey)](https://www.jil.go.jp/kokunai/blt/backnumber/2025/06/ikusei_02.html)

---

Author

[Nobu Sato](https://nobusato.jp/en/profile?hsLang=en)

Launching in Japan, starting with people and systems. I write about building organizations, sales teams and technology organizations in Japan, in English, Japanese and Chinese.

[Profile](https://nobusato.jp/en/profile?hsLang=en)[Contact](https://nobusato.jp/en/contact?hsLang=en)

## More in this column

1. 01[Six in Ten or Nearly Nine: Japan's Post-Hire Gap Surveys](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/post-hire-gap-japan?hsLang=en)9 min
   
   In a 2026 en Japan survey, 61% found their latest employer worse than pictured; 87% have felt a gap at some point. Yet ...
2. 02[Cost per Hire in Japan: About 1 Million Yen, Seven Years Old](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/cost-per-hire-japan?hsLang=en)8 min
   
   Japan's oft-quoted cost per hire, ¥1.03M mid-career and ¥0.94M per graduate, dates from fiscal 2019. What 2025 data ...
3. 03[Why Japan Hires Mid-Career: Experience Tops Two Job Types](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/mid-career-hiring-reasons-japan?hsLang=en)8 min
   
   Japan's 2025 Survey on Job Changers: ready-on-day-one experience is the top hiring reason only for managers and ...

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