Japan's New Permanent Residency Rules: What the Draft Actually Says, and What It Means for Indians

General information, not legal or immigration advice — see the note at the end.

If you live in Japan, you have probably seen the messages by now. A forwarded screenshot. A number in bold. You now need ¥5.75 million a year. You need thirty years of pension. They can take your PR away if you put the rubbish out on the wrong day.

Here is what almost nobody forwarding those messages has done: opened the document.

On 4 August 2026 the Immigration Services Agency published the full text of its draft rewrite of the permanent residence guideline, along with a separate draft guideline on when permanent residence can be revoked, and opened both for public comment until 4 September 2026. Until that day, everyone — including the people writing the summaries — was guessing from press reports. Now the text exists, it runs to thirteen pages where the current version runs to less than one, and it is free to read.

We read all of it. This article tells you what the draft actually says, which of the viral numbers appear nowhere in it, the two clauses that hit Indians hardest and that nobody is talking about, and what you can do in the next few days.

Key takeaway: The draft is real and it is a serious tightening — permanent residence would move from "meet the bar and you are generally fine" to "show you actively benefit Japan." But the specific figures circulating on WhatsApp are not in the draft. The Immigration Services Agency has published no yen amount for the income test, no pension threshold, and no asset figure. What it has published: an income standard scaled to your household size, a pension benchmark you can top up with savings, a B1 Japanese requirement (roughly JLPT N2) that exempts Highly Skilled Professionals and their families, and a start date of 1 April 2027 for most of it — with the income element arriving earlier and reaching back six months. If you are eligible now, the decision worth making this month is about timing, not panic.

What actually happened on 4 August

The current permanent residence guideline, last revised on 24 February 2026, is a short document. It restates the three statutory requirements — good conduct, ability to support yourself, and that your permanent residence is in Japan's national interest — and lists the exceptions to the ten-year rule. That is essentially it.

The draft revision is a different kind of document. Six chapters. Definitions. Sub-clauses on income, on pension, on language, on your children's schooling. For the first time, the criteria that immigration officers were applying behind the counter are written down where you can read them.

That is worth pausing on, because it cuts both ways. A longer guideline is a harder guideline. It is also a more predictable one, and the draft says so explicitly: publishing the reasoning "raises predictability for foreign nationals hoping to settle permanently, and for the Japanese people connected to them."

Both documents are open for comment on the government's e-Gov portal as case number 315000140, from 4 August at 12:00 to 4 September at 00:00 Japan time.

The sentence that changes everything else

Buried in the section on the national-interest requirement is one line that reframes the whole document:

To be recognised as meeting the national interest requirement, it is not enough to be merely passive — that is, not contrary to the national interest. It is necessary that the foreign national's permanent residence actively and concretely brings benefit to Japan.

Read that twice. The old test was a negative one: don't cause problems, don't fall behind on your taxes, and ten years of quiet residence generally carried you. The new test asks you to demonstrate something.

The draft also states, for the first time, that because permanent residence is "the most stable legal status, with no restriction on activity or period of stay," applications require "particularly careful examination."

Everything below is built on that shift. It is the single most important thing in the document, and it is not a number.

What the draft changes, clause by clause

That last row matters more than the eight above it, and we will come back to it.

Myth-bust: four numbers that are not in the document

This is the part worth forwarding.

"You need ¥5,752,000 a year." No. That figure is the average income across all Japanese households, published by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in its 2025 Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions — ¥5,752,000 for income year 2024, up 7.3% year on year, the largest rise since the survey began in 1986. It is a real number. It is not the standard. The draft says the benchmark is the average for a household of your size, and the average across all households includes large households; roughly a third of Japanese households are single people. The Immigration Services Agency has not published the table it will use. Anyone quoting you a single yen figure is extrapolating.

"You need 30 years of pension contributions." No — and this is the most damaging misreading in circulation. The thirty years is a setting on the measuring stick, not a requirement on you. The draft defines a benchmark ("受給年金水準") as the pension someone would receive after thirty years of employees' pension enrolment at that above-average income, then compares your projected pension against it — calculated from your age, your enrolment history and your current income. A 32-year-old with six years of contributions is not disqualified. They are simply further from the benchmark, and the draft says the gap can be closed with financial assets, with the required asset amount scaled to your age: the younger you are, the less you need, because you have more years to accumulate.

"They'll reject you over a missed rubbish collection." The draft contains no such list. What it contains is a clause saying applicants who show poor understanding of, or no interest in understanding, Japan's systems and rules will be marked down, assessed "by a method designated by the Commissioner" centred on the Guidebook on Living and Working. Whether that is a written test, an interview, or a document review is genuinely not stated. The rubbish-day examples circulating online are somebody's guess about a clause that has not been filled in.

"Minor offences will cost you the PR you already have." Different document, and much narrower than the rumour. The draft revocation guideline lists specific grounds — and explicitly states that traffic fines and penalty charges are not "public dues," that non-payment caused by illness, disaster, unemployment, business downturn, domestic violence or workplace harassment does not qualify, and that where your employer deducts contributions from your salary and fails to remit them, that is not held against you. The revocable criminal offences are an enumerated list of intentional crimes. And where grounds are found, the draft says the default is a Ministry-initiated change to another status — "in most cases, Long-Term Resident" — not removal, with the option to apply for permanent residence again later.

None of that makes the tightening imaginary. It makes it a different tightening from the one people are frightened of.

The clause that hits Indian IT hardest — and it is in a footnote

Here is the finding we have not seen reported anywhere, in English or in Japanese, framed for Indians.

The ten-year rule has a sub-condition: of those ten years, at least five must be held on a work status of residence. The current guideline excludes two statuses from counting as "work": Technical Intern Training and Specified Skilled Worker (i).

The draft's footnote 2 quietly extends that list. A work status of residence now means one that excludes:

• Technical Intern Training (技能実習)
• Employment for Skill Development / Ikusei Shuro (育成就労)
• Specified Skilled Worker (i) (特定技能1号)
• Intra-company Transferee (企業内転勤)
• Certain Designated Activities

Intra-company Transferee is the visa on which a large share of Indian engineers first arrive — deputed to Tokyo, Yokohama or Osaka by an Indian services firm on a two-, three- or five-year assignment. Those are exactly the people who assume their Japan clock has been running the whole time.

Worked example. Priya arrives in Tokyo in 2021 on an Intra-company Transferee visa, deputed by her Indian employer. In 2025 she joins a Japanese company and switches to Engineer/Specialist in Humanities/International Services. By 2031 she has ten years of continuous residence, so she assumes she can apply.

Under the current guideline, her position on the five-year sub-condition is arguable. Under the draft, her four Intra-company Transferee years do not count as work-status years. Her five-year clock started in 2025 and completes in 2030 — which happens to fall inside her ten years, so she is still fine. Now change one number: if she had spent seven years on Intra-company Transferee and only three on Engineer/Specialist at the ten-year mark, she would need to wait two more years despite a decade of tax residence in Japan.

The same footnote matters at the other end of the wage scale. Years on Specified Skilled Worker (i) and, from April 2027, on Ikusei Shuro do not count toward the five. If permanent residence is your goal on those routes, the move to Specified Skilled Worker (ii) is not merely a pay upgrade — it is when the clock that matters starts.

What to do about it: find your old residence cards, or request your residence history record from immigration, and write down the exact status and dates for every period. Not the years. The statuses. Then run your case through our Japan PR rules checker.

The household arithmetic that quietly penalises supporting your parents

The second under-reported clause is about how household income is counted, and it is asymmetric in a way that specifically affects Indian applicants.

The draft sets the household as the unit of assessment. Then:

• What counts as income (the numerator): your income, plus the income of people sharing your residence and your household finances. But income earned by a family member on a Dependent visa working part-time under a work permit is explicitly excluded — the draft's reasoning is that such income is permitted only "exceptionally and in a limited way," so counting it is not appropriate.
• What counts as household size (the denominator): everyone you support — and the draft states this plainly — "including relatives living abroad," whether or not they live with you. Households of five or more also get an additional amount added to the income standard for increased living costs.

Put those together. If you support your parents in Chennai, they raise the income bar you must clear, while contributing nothing to the income side. If your spouse is in Japan on a Dependent visa and works twenty hours a week, that income raises your household's actual finances but not, on the face of the draft, its assessed income.

Worked example. Rahul, 34, earns ¥6.5 million in Tokyo — comfortably above the ¥5,752,000 all-household average that everyone is quoting, and about ₹39 lakh at roughly ¥1 ≈ ₹0.60. He supports a spouse on a Dependent visa, one child in a Japanese elementary school, and both parents in India. Household size for assessment: five. The standard he must clear is the average for a five-person Japanese household plus the additional amount — not ¥5,752,000. His spouse's part-time earnings do not help. The number everyone panicked about was never his number, in either direction.

This is worth modelling honestly rather than guessing at. Our salary calculator will show you the take-home reality behind a gross figure — and if the gap between your gross salary and what actually lands in your account still surprises you, the ₹35 lakh illusion explains where the rest goes. The pension calculator will give you a projection to compare against the benchmark, bearing in mind the ISA has published neither table yet.

The good news nobody is forwarding: the points route survives, and skips the language test

Two things in the draft cut the other way, and they are genuinely significant.

First, the Highly Skilled Professional fast track is untouched. Seventy points still gets you to three years. Eighty points still gets you to one. The draft reproduces those provisions unchanged, and the opening chapter frames permanent residence as "an incentive for attracting foreign talent expected to contribute to Japan's development" and "conducive to acquiring talent in international competition." Japan is tightening the general route while deliberately keeping the skilled lane open.

Second — and this is the one to notice — the new B1 Japanese requirement (roughly JLPT N2) does not apply to Highly Skilled Professionals or their family members. The exemption list also covers people who received six or more cumulative years of Japanese elementary or secondary schooling, and certain Japan-born children of permanent residents.

For an Indian software engineer weighing whether to chase points, the calculation just changed. Last month the points route saved you years. Under the draft it can also save you a language qualification you may have no realistic path to in your thirties, with a full-time job and a family. B1 is not conversational survival Japanese — it is the level of an independent user, well beyond what most work visas require. See how much Japanese each visa actually asks for for where B1 sits, read our guide to the Highly Skilled Professional visa for Indians for what the status involves day to day, and run your score through the HSP points calculator. Degrees, salary, age, Japanese ability, university ranking and research output all feed in, and people routinely underestimate their own total.

The two dates that actually matter

1 April 2027 — the main switch. The draft states the revision applies to applications made on or after this date. Note what else falls on it: the transitional treatment that lets a person holding a three-year period of stay count as holding "the longest period of stay" expires on 31 March 2027, with only a narrow first-time carve-out afterwards. If your visa is three years rather than five, this date has been coming for you since February.

Around October 2026 — the income element, arriving early and reaching back. The official summary published with the draft states that the income-related elements take effect "in October this year," while the rest waits for April 2027. The mechanism in the draft text is unusual and worth understanding: the income clause and the public-burden clause apply to applications filed from six months before the revision date, where those applications are still pending on the revision date. The revision date itself is left blank in the draft (令和８年○月○日). If it lands on 1 October 2026, the six-month reach-back is roughly 1 April 2026.

In plain terms: filing early does not by itself insulate you, if your application is still sitting in the queue when the guideline changes.

And the fee. Separately from all of this, the amendment act passed on 29 May 2026 raised the statutory ceiling on the permanent residence application fee to ¥300,000. Japan's Cabinet adopted the fee ordinance on 25 August 2026, setting the permanent residence application fee at ¥200,000 for applications received from 1 October 2026 — up from ¥10,000 today. That is roughly ₹6,000 becoming roughly ₹1.2 lakh, a twentyfold increase, and it is non-refundable if you are refused. Renewals and status changes move from a flat ¥6,000 to a band running up to ¥75,000. For the full breakdown, see our guide to the fee increase.

So should you file now, or wait?

There is no universally right answer, and anyone who gives you one without asking about your status history is guessing. But the draft does let you sort yourself into four situations.

You are clearly eligible today — ten years, five on a qualifying work status, longest period of stay, taxes and pension clean, comfortable income. Filing before 1 October saves roughly ¥190,000. The risk is the retroactivity clause: a pending application can still be assessed against the new income element. On balance, for this group, earlier is usually cheaper and no worse.

You are eligible but your income sits near the average. This is the group with the most to lose from waiting and the most exposure to the reach-back. Worth a paid consultation with a licensed immigration lawyer or administrative scrivener this month, not in March.

You will become eligible in 2027 or later. You cannot outrun this by rushing. Use the time instead: verify which of your years actually count under the footnote-2 definition, get your pension record straight, and if the points route is within reach, chase it — it shortens the wait and exempts you from B1.

You are on Specified Skilled Worker (i), Ikusei Shuro, Technical Intern Training or Intra-company Transferee. Your five-year work-status clock has not started. That is not a reason to despair; it is a reason to plan the move to a status that counts, and to read our piece on the three-years-or-forever decision before assuming permanent residence is the right goal for you at all. For a substantial number of Indians in Japan, it is not — and the pension lump-sum route has its own arithmetic.

For the underlying mechanics of the ten-year rule, the points system and the documents you will need, our full guide to permanent residency in Japan for Indians is the place to start.

You can comment on this — until 4 September

This is the part that surprises most people: the consultation is genuinely open, and the draft is a draft. Public comment closes at 00:00 on 4 September 2026 Japan time — so in practice, the end of 3 September.

Submissions go through the e-Gov public comment portal, case 315000140. The submission form and instructions are in Japanese, and the notice asks you to read the full instructions and draft before submitting. The enquiry contact listed is the Residence Management Division of the Immigration Services Agency.

If you do comment, specificity beats volume. "This is unfair" carries less weight than "the household-size provision counts dependants abroad in the denominator while excluding Dependent-visa income from the numerator, which produces the following outcome for a household of five." A Japanese civil-society coalition has already published a joint statement opposing the tightening, so organised responses are going in either way.

Whatever you decide, do not let this be the thing you find out about in April 2027.

FAQ

Is any of this final? No. The permanent residence guideline revision and the revocation guideline are both drafts open for public comment until 4 September 2026. The revision date is still blank in the text. Figures for the income standard, the pension benchmark and the top-up asset amounts have not been published at all.

Do I really need ¥5.75 million a year? That figure is not in the draft. The draft says household income must continuously exceed the average for a Japanese household of your size, and the ISA has not released the table it will use. ¥5,752,000 is the MHLW's all-household average for 2024 — useful context, not a threshold.

I have only paid into the pension for a few years. Am I finished? Not according to the draft. The thirty-year figure defines the benchmark, not a required contribution history. Your projected pension is calculated from your age, enrolment record and income, and any shortfall can be covered by financial assets, with a lower asset bar for younger applicants.

Does the new Japanese language requirement apply to me? B1 (roughly JLPT N2) would be required under the draft, with exemptions including Highly Skilled Professionals and their family members, people with six or more cumulative years of Japanese primary or secondary schooling, and certain Japan-born children of permanent residents. If you are on the points route, this is one of the strongest arguments for staying on it.

My spouse and I are married three years. Does the old fast track still apply? The draft raises the spousal special provision from three years married plus one year resident to five years married plus three years resident, with the main revision applying to applications from 1 April 2027. If you are close to qualifying under the current numbers, the timing of your application is now a real decision.

Can my permanent residence be taken away for a traffic ticket? The draft revocation guideline says traffic fines and penalty charges are not "public dues" and so do not fall under the non-payment ground. The criminal ground is an enumerated list of intentional offences resulting in imprisonment. And where grounds are found, the stated default is a change to another status — usually Long-Term Resident — rather than removal.

What about my children's schooling? The draft adds a factor: if you support a child of compulsory-school age, that child should be attending elementary or junior high school. The text does not state whether international or foreign schools satisfy it, which is one of several genuine open questions. Our guide to schooling in Japan for Indian children covers the options as they stand.

Where can I read the documents myself? The draft revision, the official summary and the draft revocation guideline are all linked from the e-Gov consultation page, case 315000140. They are in Japanese. The current guideline is on the ISA website.

The bottom line

Japan is not closing the door. It is putting a heavier one on the same frame, and telling you a year in advance exactly where the hinges are — which is more warning than most countries give.

The rules that will decide your case are being written right now, in a document you can read and respond to until 3 September. The version of them being forwarded around WhatsApp is not the version that exists.

Your move this week: pull out your old residence cards and write down the exact status of residence for every year you have been in Japan — not just the count of years. That one list determines more about your permanent residence timeline than any income figure in the news, and almost nobody has made it. Then run it through our PR rules checker.

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This article is general information, not legal, immigration, tax, or financial advice. It describes draft guidelines that were open for public comment when it was written and that may change before they take effect. Rules, fees, figures and dates change and vary by individual circumstances — verify the latest details with official sources (the Immigration Services Agency of Japan and the relevant embassy) and consult a qualified professional, such as a licensed immigration lawyer or administrative scrivener, before making decisions about your own case.