Japan digital nomad visa

What the visa gives you, and what it does not

Japan's digital nomad visa has been running since April 2024. Formally it is not a residence permit but a status of residence called Designated Activities: the main applicant gets it under Notice No. 53, a spouse and children under Notice No. 54.

In practice it means you enter Japan for up to six months with a legal right to work remotely for employers and clients outside Japan. Almost everything else that usually comes with the word visa is missing here.

Holders of this status are not treated as mid- to long-term residents. Everything else follows from that:

• no residence card (zairyu card) is issued;
• no municipal address registration and no juminhyo certificate;
• no My Number;
• no access to National Health Insurance;
• the six months count towards neither permanent residence nor citizenship.

The period cannot be extended under any circumstances. When it ends you must leave and spend at least six months outside Japan before applying again. There is no cap on how many times you can repeat this, but the cycle is always the same: six months in, six months out.

Who can apply: your passport decides

The country list is built on two conditions at once. The country must have visa-free short-stay access to Japan and a tax treaty with it. Miss either one and that citizenship is not enough, however high your income is.

The list for main applicants holds roughly fifty countries and regions. Japan's Immigration Services Agency has amended it several times, so the current version is worth checking right before you file.

Published versions disagree on a handful of entries: Taiwan, the UAE, Luxembourg, Argentina and Peru appear in some editions on the main list and in others only on the family list. Those are exactly the cases where checking the official publication before you start assembling documents is not optional.

The list for a spouse and children is wider than the main one, because it also covers places that have visa-free access to Japan without a full tax treaty. It happens that a spouse's passport gives no right to the nomad visa itself but does allow them to accompany you.

If your passport is from the former Soviet space

Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have no visa-free arrangement with Japan, so they are not on the list and there is no workaround. Residence elsewhere, tax residency elsewhere and a long history of Japanese tourist visas change nothing: the consulate looks only at the citizenship in the passport you file with. The one real route is a second passport from the list - Israel, Serbia, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico or Chile, for example.

The ¥10,000,000 income test and how it is measured

The threshold is fixed in yen and has not moved since the programme launched. At 2026 rates that is roughly 55,000-60,000 euros or 65,000-70,000 dollars, but the equivalent floats with the yen, so plan against the yen figure and confirm the rate on the day you file.

Four things matter about this threshold:

• It is personal, not household. You cannot add a spouse's earnings: the main applicant alone shows ¥10 million.
• They look at actual income for the last completed year, evidenced on paper - not a forecast, an offer letter or a contract signed last week.
• For freelancers and business owners it is income after expenses - what you declared. Large turnover with modest declared profit does not clear the bar.
• Savings are not a substitute. A healthy balance without recurring earnings will not do; the programme is built around active income.

Evidence usually means a tax certificate or return for the previous year, an employment contract with a foreign employer showing salary, client contracts, an employer income statement and recent bank statements. Translations are normally required, and certification rules differ from one consulate to another, so confirm them early.

The income must originate outside Japan. Working for a Japanese company, a Japanese individual or Japanese clients is prohibited on this visa even if payment lands in a foreign account. That is not a technicality - breaching the terms is grounds to cancel the status.

Insurance: the second ¥10 million hurdle

The second hard requirement is private medical insurance covering the entire stay. The policy must cover death, injury and illness, with cover for treatment of injury or illness of at least ¥10,000,000. You submit the insurance certificate plus a summary of terms that shows both the sum insured and the policy dates.

More applications trip on insurance than on income. A standard travel policy runs 30-90 days with lower limits, while a 180-day contract with ¥10 million treatment cover is a distinct product that not every insurer sells. The policy dates have to span the whole period of stay, not just the first months.

Japan's National Health Insurance is closed to you: only mid- to long-term residents with municipal registration can enrol. So at a clinic you pay the full price on the spot and claim it back from your insurer afterwards. In Japan that matters - the care is excellent, but a non-resident without local cover pays the full tariff, and a hospital bill runs into hundreds of thousands of yen quickly.

Family members follow the same rule: your spouse and each child need cover. Sometimes that is an extension of the main policy, sometimes separate contracts - both are accepted as long as the paperwork shows the required sum per person.

Tax: where 20.42% comes from and when it applies to you

Guides quote a 20.42% rate for this visa, which leaves the impression that a nomad hands a fifth of their income to Japan. Usually that is wrong - but the stay is not automatically tax-free either. Here is the actual mechanism.

Tax residency

Under Japanese law you are a resident if you have a domicile in Japan or have lived there continuously for one year or more. Six months creates neither, so a nomad is normally a Japanese tax non-resident. Local inhabitant tax (juminzei) does not arise either, since it falls on people registered at an address on 1 January and you are not in the register.

What a non-resident is taxed on

A non-resident pays Japanese tax only on Japan-source income, at a flat 20.42% - 20% plus the 2.1% reconstruction surtax. That is where the number comes from. The real question is what counts as Japan-source.

The non-obvious part: under Japanese domestic law, remuneration for work physically performed in Japan is Japan-source income even when a foreign employer pays it into a foreign account. What saves you is not where the money lands but the tax treaty. Almost every Japanese treaty carries a short-stay exemption that removes the tax when three conditions hold together - presence of no more than 183 days in the calendar, fiscal or any twelve-month period; salary paid by a non-resident employer; and the cost not borne by a permanent establishment in Japan.

That is why six months is a fine line. The full visa period is roughly 180-184 days, and if it falls across the counting period so that you pass 183 days, the treaty exemption stops working and the salary attributable to workdays in Japan becomes taxable.

Freelancers and business owners work on different logic. A non-resident's business income is taxable in Japan only if attributable to a permanent establishment. Working alone from a rented flat or a coworking space normally creates none - but hiring people in Japan, taking an office or selling into the local market changes that picture.

Most importantly, the visa does not switch off tax at home. You almost certainly remain a resident of your own country and keep paying there; six months in Japan is rarely enough to break home residency. Assess the employer's exposure separately: an employee working from Japan for half a year can raise permanent establishment and social security questions for the company. Get written permission before you file. Country-by-country tax regimes are compared in our tax overview.

Applying: documents, timing and fees

You apply at a Japanese embassy or consulate in your country of citizenship or lawful residence. A Certificate of Eligibility is not mandatory for this category, but the file is referred to Japan for review, so the headline five working days does not apply. Budget anywhere from several weeks to two or three months.

On 1 July 2026 Japan raised consular fees for the first time since 1978: a single-entry visa went from roughly ¥3,000 to ¥15,000 and a multiple-entry visa from ¥6,000 to ¥30,000. The amount is converted into local currency at each mission's rate, so the price differs by country.

Trips out of Japan mid-stay deserve their own thought. The simplified re-entry mechanism is built around residence card holders, and you will not have one. Price a multiple-entry visa before you book flights, and confirm the exact re-entry procedure for this specific status with the consulate at filing. A mistake here costs you the rest of your stay - you simply may not get back in.

Family, housing, banking and connectivity

Family

A spouse and unmarried children under 18 receive the same six-month status under Notice No. 54. They may not work. Each needs their own medical cover at the same level, plus documents proving the relationship.

Schooling is the weak point. Without municipal registration, placing a child in a public school for six months becomes a negotiation with a particular ward, and Tokyo's international schools are expensive and rarely take pupils for a single term.

Housing

You will not be offered a normal lease: Japanese renting requires a residence card, a guarantor, a deposit and often non-refundable key money. The workable options are furnished monthly accommodation, share houses and serviced apartments.

Outside Tokyo - in Osaka, Fukuoka or Sapporo - the same formats cost noticeably less, with comparable internet and coworking. A single person's all-in budget in Tokyo realistically lands at ¥250,000-400,000 a month, lower in the regions.

Banking, phone, driving

A Japanese bank account is out of reach: banks want a residence card and a registered address. Multi-currency accounts, foreign bank cards and ATM withdrawals at convenience stores and the post office bank do the job. Keep cash on hand - card acceptance is broad but not universal.

A postpaid SIM contract is unavailable without a residence card, so travel eSIMs and prepaid data SIMs are the norm. You can drive on a Geneva Convention international driving permit for up to one year, but you cannot convert to a Japanese licence: conversion needs the same municipal registration you do not have.

Who this visa does not suit, and what goes wrong

An honest list of situations where you should look elsewhere.

• Passport not on the list. There is no workaround. Residence permits, travel history and income several times over the threshold do not substitute for an eligible citizenship.
• Income exists but is hard to evidence. Crypto payments, cash, earnings spread across jurisdictions with no single tax filing - the most common source of trouble at formally sufficient amounts.
• You want permanent residence or citizenship. These six months count towards nothing. For scale: the standard path to permanent residence in Japan is ten years of living there, less on a work status, and one to three years on the highly skilled professional track.
• You need Japanese clients or a Japanese employer. Flatly prohibited, with no carve-out for one-off projects.
• School-age children. Six months without registration is a poor structure for schooling.
• Chronic conditions requiring ongoing care. Everything runs through a private policy, and those usually exclude pre-existing conditions.
• You are counting on staying longer. There is no extension, and after leaving you owe six months outside Japan.

What else breaks in practice:

• Refusal without reasons. Japanese consulates are not obliged to explain and there is no appeal. Trying again means a fresh application and a fresh fee, which quintupled in July 2026.
• Inconsistent paperwork. If the planned activities form says one thing and your contracts and tax certificate say another, the file goes to additional review and the timeline doubles.
• A policy of the wrong shape. An aggregate limit instead of treatment cover, dates shorter than the stay, no death cover - each detail sends the pack back.
• A trip in the middle of the stay. Leaving on a single-entry visa and being unable to return is common and entirely preventable.
• Employer pushback. Half a year of an employee working from Japan concerns their lawyers and payroll as much as it concerns you.
• The yen. The threshold is fixed in yen: if the yen strengthens, a salary in euros or dollars can stop clearing ¥10 million without changing at all.

Alternatives if you need longer than six months

Pay attention to the Business Manager visa in particular. Until October 2025 it was a relatively accessible entry with ¥5 million of capital, and older articles still describe those terms. The capital requirement is now ¥30 million, on top of staffing, language and business plan conditions. Renewals get a transition period, but new applicants file under the new rules.

If Japan is meant as a base for remote work rather than a country to settle in, the usual structure is different: take your main residence in a country with a long nomad visa and a legible tax regime, and use Japan in six-month bursts. Compare options in our digital nomad visa overview; regionally the closest fits are Thailand and Malaysia. The country page is Japan.

Checklist before you file

1. Citizenship. Is your country on the current Immigration Services Agency list for main applicants, not just for family members?
2. Income. Does your declared personal income for the last completed year clear ¥10 million, and can you document it rather than assert it?
3. Insurance. Does your market offer a 180-day policy with ¥10 million treatment cover, worded in a way the consulate will accept?
4. Employer. Do they permit six months of work from Japan, and do they understand their own tax exposure?
5. Tax. How many days will you actually spend in Japan, do you cross 183, and what happens to your home residency?
6. Dates. When to file so that the visa, the policy and your intended entry line up.
7. Trips. Do you need a multiple-entry visa, and how exactly will re-entry work?

Why consider the Japan visa

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