Japan’s government adopted an ordinance on Tuesday to raise the fees foreign nationals pay to renew or change their residency status, replacing the current flat ¥6,000 charge with a tiered scale that reaches ¥75,000 for the longest extensions. Under the new schedule, extensions of up to three months will cost ¥10,000, one-year extensions ¥33,000, three-to-five-year extensions ¥64,000, and extensions of five years or more ¥75,000. The changes take effect in October.
The steepest increase applies to permanent residency applications, whose fee rises to ¥200,000 from ¥10,000 — a twentyfold jump. The fee hikes were written into the revised Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act that Japan’s parliament enacted in May, which caps the ceiling at ¥100,000 for temporary residency procedures and ¥300,000 for permanent residency, leaving the specific amounts to be set by ordinance.
Japan’s Immigration Services Agency also widened the pool of applicants eligible for reduced fees, after reviewing public comments on the draft rules. Reduced fees — as low as ¥10,000 for temporary procedures and ¥20,000 for permanent residency — were already available to applicants facing financial hardship comparable to welfare-recipient thresholds combined with humanitarian need. The agency has now extended that humanitarian carve-out to foreign nationals who are the sole caregiver raising the biological children of Japanese nationals or of “special permanent residents” (a status held by those who lived in Japan before the end of World War II and their descendants), and to cases where denying residency would be considered inhumane.
References
The Japan Times – Japan adopts ordinance to raise foreign nationals’ residency fees from October
