Money, Money, Money
Money. “Can’t buy me love,” sang the Beatles. But very useful for rent, snacks, conveyor belt sushi, and trips to the onsen. No wonder questions about software engineer salaries in Japan are some of the most common I receive from job hunters, both from those already here seeking a change and those overseas looking to relocate.
This article focuses specifically on the English-speaking segment of the tech job market in Japan. Software developers are currently the largest in-demand group in the English-speaking IT job market here, and there’s some solid publicly available data.
This post isn’t going to be a list of salaries for specific programming languages or skill sets. I’m not going to give you a range for Java developers, iOS engineers or frontend devs. This kind of information changes over time and you can find it in annual salary surveys from job boards and recruiting agencies.
But salary surveys often show wide ranges that provide little insight. My goal with this post is to take a look behind the numbers and explain how the salaries you read about are distributed across the job market.
While salaries vary across tech disciplines, underlying factors remain the same, so this article should be useful to you even if you are not a software engineer.
A Note for Overseas Readers
When I first moved to Japan from London, I had a habit of converting the price of everything into pounds sterling. An ¥800 lunch was £4. A ¥20,000 interview suit was £100. After living here for several years, I stopped this mental arithmetic. I was being paid in Yen, everything I bought was in Yen, there was Yen in my wallet and Yen in my savings account. Yen had become my base currency. Inflation had changed the prices back home when I visited, removing my anchor. I expect this way of thinking is commonplace.
If you’re exploring living and working in Japan, a simple conversion of salary to your home currency will not give you a like-for-like comparison. You need to consider the cost of living and quality of life here. Learn about Purchasing Power Parity to understand how far your salary will go in Japan. Numbeo is a good starting point for cost of living comparison research.
You should also understand your goals. Are you planning to live in Japan short or long-term? What lifestyle do you want to live here? Are you single or do you have a family? Will you be sending money to your family back home? Or building up savings for an eventual return to your home country?
Everyone’s situation is different – think carefully about what matters to you.
Data Sources
In this article, when we talk about software engineer salaries in Japan, we mainly reference OpenSalary.jp and related datasets. OpenSalary is a community-based salary transparency platform for tech professionals in Japan.
(For more background, read my interview with OpenSalary founder Drew Terry).
OpenSalary’s data mainly reflects companies in Japan’s modern tech scene, including many with English-speaking environments. It also includes data from several “domestic” Japanese companies (those with Japanese corporate culture and Japanese-language working environments), helping to illustrate some of my key points. It’s a relevant source for this article, as tech firms account for much of today’s software developer hiring, including many of the opportunities for overseas engineers to relocate to Japan. They are also a preferred employer for many developers.
OpenSalary is a fantastic resource, but no dataset covers everything. As the site mainly reflects tech companies, there’s little input from software engineers at banks, insurance companies, automakers, consulting firms, outsourcing vendors, and other industries where English-speaking developers work.
Also, there’s no filter for working language, so you can’t tell from the data who is working in English, Japanese, or both. You need to look at individual companies, teams or roles to understand required language skills.
However, it captures enough of the English-speaking market to be useful to us. I’ll be combining with data from other sources and with my own experience as a recruiter speaking daily to companies and engineers. Note: I don’t generally bother with Glassdoor. It’s annoying to use and I lost confidence in their data years ago.
All salaries stated are gross (pre-tax) salaries before deductions for income tax, social insurance, etc. This is the standard way salaries are expressed in Japan. For brevity, I’ll use “M” to denote “millions” when stating salaries, so 7M JPY refers to 7 million JPY.
What the Data Tells Us About Salaries
According to Japan’s National Tax Agency, the average salary for a full-time worker in Japan in 2023 was 5.3M JPY (2023 is the most recent year for which data is available).
Kyujin Box, a job search engine operated by Recruit (who also own Indeed), stated in a 2024 article that the average full-time software engineer’s salary in Japan is 5.27M JPY. That’s pretty much bang on the all-worker average and perhaps reflects the traditional position that software engineering isn’t a particularly glamorous endeavour in Japanese companies.
It should be noted that Kyujin Box’s salary data was extracted from job postings, rather than reported by employees. That said, I think it’s a good view into the domestic Japanese job market.
Of course, averages only tell us so much. Salaries vary by industry, role, age, location, gender, and other factors, but I think these serve as good anchor points to keep in mind.
Let’s take a look at the full data on OpenSalary.jp for Software Engineers at the time of writing (February 2025):
This data consists of all the software engineering disciplines that OpenSalary tracks (fullstack, frontend, backend, mobile, etc.), across all years of experience, and is based on 1,418 individual salary entries.
The median salary is 7.8M JPY, consisting of:
- 6.4M JPY base
- 0.9M JPY bonus
- 0.5M JPY equity
This is 47% higher than the national average wage we noted earlier.
As is often the case with salary distributions, it’s right-skewed. While most of the salaries cluster around the mid-range, we have a long-tail of higher salaries to the right.
This distribution holds across specialties. For example, for Backend developer data (526 entries):
And across years of experience – here’s the data for all software engineers with 4 to 6 years of experience (431 entries):
From 2.3M JPY to 28M JPY. That’s quite a range!
So what exactly are we seeing here?
For engineers with 4-6 years of experience, salaries break down roughly as follows:
- Lowest paid: Small local companies and domestic/international outsourcing vendors.
- Highest paid: Google, Microsoft, Apple, Indeed, and Woven by Toyota. In other words, Big Tech firms paying ‘global’ salaries, and a small group of companies competing with them for top talent (Woven being a tech subsidiary of Toyota).
- Around the median: Established Japanese tech industry brands such as Rakuten, CyberAgent and LINE (LY Corporation), or successful startups/post-IPO companies such as SmartNews, Freee, MoneyForward and Mercari.
Similar patterns can be seen across the data when controlling for years of experience, and if we look at other functions
Many of the mid- and high-paying companies use English as their working language in Engineering and have global, meritocratic work cultures, as opposed to Japan’s traditional top-down culture (although a move to flatter, more meritocratic work cultures is becoming more common in Japan as a whole).
The salaries they pay are typically based on competitive market rates, rather than Japan’s traditional seniority-based pay system (Nenkō joretsu), reflecting the difficulties in hiring and retaining highly skilled engineers here. Salaries at some of the bigger firms are likely to include some kind of equity component too, which isn’t so common in Japan in general.
Here’s a conundrum. If you’ve spoken with me about finding a job in Japan, I’ve probably told you to improve your Japanese language skills. But according to the data, the highest-paid engineers may not be using Japanese at all. The reason for this is the size of the individual job markets – those Big Tech jobs are a small slice of the total job market here. Each opening at Google or Woven attracts hundreds of applicants competing for the same role, many of them world-class. Improving your Japanese opens up many more opportunities for you at a much wider range of companies.
To get another perspective, Levels.FYI reports a median software engineer salary in Japan of 8.43M JPY, based on 979 entries at the time of writing.
I reviewed each entry (the things I do for you!) and my impression is that while I expect many, if not most, of the entries represent English-speaking roles (I don’t think Levels.FYI has much visibility in Japan outside the international dev community), the data appears somewhat top-heavy to me, which likely shifts the median higher than OpenSalary.
For example, the top 5 entries include two Executive Directors (EDs) at JPMorgan, earning 35M JPY and 45M JPY, respectively. EDs are senior roles, are not likely to be individual contributors, and are just not very representative of most software engineering jobs in Japan.
Having said that, Levels.FYI can still be a useful reference if they have significant data on a company you’re applying to.
General Factors That Explain Salary Differences
Boiling all this down, here are a couple of general principles to understand what level of salary you can expect from different companies:
- The more international the company (for example, if the working language is English or it’s a multinational corporation), the higher the salary tends to be.
- The bigger the company, the higher the salary tends to be.
Of course, these are very general and there will always be exceptions.
Are Software Engineer Salaries in Japan Low?
Are salaries in Japan low? As I mentioned earlier, the answer isn’t straightforward – it depends on what you’re comparing them to and how.
For those coming from the US or other developed countries, tech salaries may look low. For someone from a developing country or in another industry in Japan, they can be very attractive.
It all depends on your frame of reference. Generally, though, as we’ve seen, salaries for English-speaking tech professionals in Japan are above the national average, often significantly higher.
Final Thoughts
I hope this post has helped you to understand both software engineer salaries in Japan and the tech job market here a little better. Play around with OpenSalary. Look at the results for different companies & industries, tech specialisations, and years of experience.
If you’re working as a software engineer in Japan, I encourage you to submit your own salary to OpenSalary. You can submit it anonymously, and you’ll be contributing to transparency that helps empower the engineering community.
Looking for a new IT job in Japan? Check out my job board. Hiring? Get in touch and let’s see how I can help.
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