Japan raises the permanent-residency fee twentyfold and sets an income floor near 5.75 million yen

Japan's immigration agency raised the fee for a permanent-residency application to 200,000 yen on 1 October, about $1,270, roughly twenty times the previous charge. The New York Times put the old fee at $64. The BBC put the new one at 200,000 yen. Either way, it is the largest residency-fee increase the country has recorded, and it landed on the same morning as a thicker rulebook for who may stay.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has treated the foreign-resident population as a political problem since she took office in October 2025. On X, days before the fee change, she wrote that some citizens feel anxiety and a sense of unfairness. The measures, she said, were meant to keep both citizens and foreigners living safely. The package sits under a title the government calls the Comprehensive Measures for Acceptance and Coexistence of Foreign Nationals.

The fee is only the part that bites immediately. Revised guidelines published by the immigration agency on Thursday, and reported by Kyodo, mostly take effect in April 2027. Applicants will need income at or above the average for Japanese households. That average was about 5.75 million yen in 2024, near $36,500. They will also need projected pension benefits in line with what an employee might receive after 30 years in the employees' pension programme, calculated at the income level on the day of application.

Language is new as a formal test. For the first time, the agency will score Japanese ability and an applicant's grasp of rules and customs. The bar in the revised guidelines is the level of an independent user. The income test is harsher on timing than the language test: authorities will apply it back to applications filed from April 2026, so people already in the queue do not escape it.

The ordinary residence rule is unchanged in outline. In principle an applicant still needs more than 10 years in Japan. The spouse route is what moved. A spouse of a Japanese national or permanent resident used to qualify after three years of marriage and one year of residence. The revised guidelines lift that to five years of marriage and three years of residence. That single change adds two years of marriage and two years of living in the country before a spouse can even file.

Other status fees rose on the same day, on a sliding scale. Extending a stay or changing status used to cost 6,000 yen. From 1 October the charge runs from 10,000 yen for three months or less to 75,000 yen for five years or more. Permanent residency is the outlier at 200,000 yen, and it is the status that, once granted, has been the hardest to unwind.

That last point is also changing. Under the new rules the government can revoke permanent residency if the holder fails to pay pension contributions, health insurance or taxes, or if the holder breaks immigration law or the penal code. Revocation used to be a narrow tool. It is now tied to ordinary compliance with the tax and social-insurance system.

The foreign-resident count that Takaichi is answering was 4.12 million at the end of 2025, a record, and 9.5 percent higher than the year before. Companies have recruited abroad to fill labour gaps. A weak yen has pulled in tourists and, with them, longer stays. Immigration bureaus saw the rush before the fee day. Tokyo's main office reported waits of more than seven hours as people tried to file under the old price.

The political arithmetic is plain. A twentyfold fee does not reduce the 4.12 million already here. It raises the price of the next application and, from April 2027, filters that queue by income, pension maths and language. The spouse change is the part most coverage has treated as a footnote. For a family that married last year and planned to file after the old one-year residence mark, the clock has been reset by two years.

What the guidelines do not settle is enforcement capacity. Revocation for unpaid insurance only works if the agency can match residency files to pension and tax records at scale. The fee hike needs no such system. It is already in force.