Living in Tokyo

Tokyo, Japan, about 9,733,276 people. What you would earn and keep, the climate month by month, and every open figure we hold, each with its source, period and licence.

Weigh Tokyo against other cities, with your own numbers

Key facts

• Tokyo has about 9,733,276 residents (GeoNames).
• On a gross salary of JP¥11,000,000 a year, an employee in Tokyo takes home about JP¥7,920,069 a year (JP¥660,006 a month) after income tax and employee contributions, an effective rate of 28.0% (Japan 2026 rules).
• In Tokyo the average daily high (air temperature in the shade) peaks at 32.6 °C in August and the average daily low falls to 0.0 °C in January (Historical weather (ERA5 reanalysis), Open-Meteo, 2021-2025).
• Tokyo has about 22 nice days a year, days that are dry, mostly clear and feel 18 to 30 °C on average from 8 am to 8 pm, most of them in October (6) (Historical weather (ERA5 reanalysis), Open-Meteo, 2021-2025).
• Between 2021 and 2025 the air in Tokyo reached 39.4 °C at its hottest and −7.7 °C at its coldest (Historical weather (ERA5 reanalysis), Open-Meteo).
• It rains or snows (at least 1 mm) on about 131 days a year in Tokyo (Historical weather (ERA5 reanalysis), Open-Meteo, 2021-2025).
• The shortest day in Tokyo lasts 9 h 44 min and the longest 14 h 35 min (computed from latitude).
• Fine dust (PM2.5) in Tokyo averages 10.8 µg/m³ a year, 2.2 times the WHO guideline of 5 µg/m³ (WHO Ambient Air Quality Database v8.0 (2026), World Health Organization, 2019).
• Everyday prices in Japan sit at 69.0 on an index where the United States is 100 (World Development Indicators, World Bank, 2025).
• Life expectancy at birth in Japan is 84.0 years (World Development Indicators, World Bank, 2024).
• Japan records 0.23 intentional homicides per 100,000 people a year (World Development Indicators, World Bank, 2023).
• Only citizens of Japan can live and work in Tokyo without a visa or permit; everyone else needs one.

What you would take home

Resident employee under 40 in Tokyo's 23 wards, salary for 2026: national income tax and reconstruction surtax, resident tax on that income, and employee social insurance (health, child support levy, pension, employment insurance). Rules for 2026. Sources: NTA: No.2260 income tax rates, NTA: No.1410 employment income deduction (2026 reform), NTA: No.1199 basic deduction (2026 reform), NTA: April 2026 withholding tax changes (basic deduction bands for 2026 and 2027), Tokyo Bureau of Taxation: individual resident tax, Chuo City: resident tax basic deduction, Nerima City: resident tax adjustment credit, Kyokai Kenpo: Tokyo premium table from March 2026, MHLW: employment insurance rates for fiscal 2026.

• Resident tax on 2026 salary is billed from June 2027; it is shown here against the year it is earned on.
• Health insurance is Kyokai Kenpo (Tokyo); company health insurance societies often charge less. Under 40: no long-term care premium (an extra 0.81% from age 40 to 64).
• Salary is treated as twelve equal months with no bonus; bonuses have their own premium ceilings.
• Employment income below ¥6.6 million is computed with the formula, not the statutory table, so it can differ by a few thousand yen.
• No spouse, dependants or life insurance deductions (iDeCo set as your pension share is deducted); below ¥88,000 a month the model assumes no employee insurance.

A month in Tokyo

Assumed: one person, €60,000 gross a year, renting a one-bedroom home, and everyday spending of €1,200 a month in Lisbon scaled by each country's price level. These are the app's defaults; change any of them there.

Who can live and work here freely

• Citizens of Japan.
• Everyone else needs a visa or permit.

Climate

Daylight is computed from latitude: the shortest day lasts 9 h 44 min, the longest 14 h 35 min.

Every figure

No open figure yet for: rent, one bedroom, rent, three bedrooms, your childcare cost, health insurance premium, public swimming pools (official), green urban areas (official), commuting by public transport, commute time, monthly transit pass, road deaths, born abroad, english speakers, adults with a degree, walking or cycling to work, politics, left to right. A country-wide figure is marked as such where it stands in for the city.

Compare Tokyo with

• Tokyo vs Helsinki
• Tokyo vs Melbourne
• Tokyo vs Seattle
• Tokyo vs Singapore
• Tokyo vs Sydney
• Tokyo vs Vancouver

Elsewhere

Sources we link to but do not copy, because their licences forbid it.

• Numbeo: cost of living in Tokyo
• WeatherSpark: year-round weather in Tokyo
• Wikipedia: Tokyo

Credits

• Borgo contributors, from the statutes cited in each figure's note (CC BY 4.0)
• Unicode CLDR territory information. Copyright © 1991-2026 Unicode, Inc. Used under the Unicode License v3 (https://www.unicode.org/license.txt) (Unicode License v3)
• Borgo contributors, from the statutes cited in each figure's note (CC BY 4.0)
• Founders Running Club communities list (facts of presence and links only) (No licence from the publisher: only facts of presence are stored)
• Places, coordinates, populations and time zones from GeoNames (geonames.org), CC BY 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
• GHS-UCDB R2024A, European Commission, Joint Research Centre, CC BY 4.0, doi:10.2905/1a338be6-7eaf-480c-9664-3a8ade88cbcd; Borgo derives the distance from the centre to the urban centre's edge Shores and lakes from Natural Earth (public domain) decide which directions lead on to land. (CC BY 4.0)
• Counts of GitHub profiles by stated location, from GitHub's public user search (counts only, no profile data) (No data licence from the publisher: only total counts are stored, no record about anyone, as its terms allow public, non-personal information in openly published research)
• Borgo contributors, from the labour codes cited in each figure's note (CC BY 4.0)
• The M-Lab NDT Data Set, 2023-01-01–2023-12-31. https://measurementlab.net/tests/ndt (CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication))
• Public holidays from Nager.Date (date.nager.at), MIT License, Copyright (c) Nager (MIT License)
• Made with Natural Earth (public domain) (Public domain (dedicated by the publisher))
• OECD (2026), Net childcare costs, OECD Tax-Benefit Models, https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/net-childcare-costs.html Reusers must cite the OECD as above and pass this acknowledgement requirement on to anyone they share the data with. (OECD terms for data: any use, with the OECD citation passed on)
• OECD (2026), OECD Family Database, PF2.1 Parental leave systems, https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/oecd-family-database.html Reusers must cite the OECD as above and pass this acknowledgement requirement on to anyone they share the data with. (OECD terms for data: any use, with the OECD citation passed on)
• OECD (2026), OECD Well-being Database (How's Life?), https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/well-being-database.html Reusers must cite the OECD as above and pass this acknowledgement requirement on to anyone they share the data with. (OECD terms for data: any use, with the OECD citation passed on)
• Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (https://open-meteo.com/), CC BY 4.0 Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2021-2025. Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use that may be made of the Copernicus information or data it contains. (CC BY 4.0)
• OpenAlex (openalex.org), CC0 (CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication))
• © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0 (https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright) (Open Database License 1.0)
• © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0 (https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright) (Open Database License 1.0)
• Airports from OurAirports (ourairports.com), public domain (Public domain (dedicated by the publisher))
• Research Organization Registry (ror.org), CC0 (CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication))
• Terrain Tiles on AWS Open Data (Mapzen, a Linux Foundation project): SRTM and GMTED2010 terrain data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey; ETOPO1, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Canada terrain data contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada (Terrain Tiles source terms: public domain (USGS, NOAA) and Open Government Licence – Canada, with attribution)
• World Health Organization, WHO Ambient Air Quality Database (Version 8.0), 2026, accessed 2026-10-27; data provided by the national and regional agencies named in each value's note WHO does not endorse Borgo, its use of these data, or any city ranking built from them. Values are as published by WHO; WHO advises against using the database to rank cities or compare countries directly, because monitoring differs between places. (WHO terms and conditions for data compilations)
• WMO Member Nations (2023). WMO Climatological Standard Normals for 1991-2020 (NCEI Accession 0253808), sunshine duration. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. https://doi.org/10.25921/800j-vn07 (No licence attached: NCEI public access with a requested citation, under the WMO Unified Data Policy)
• World Bank, World Development Indicators, CC BY 4.0 (underlying sources named in each figure's note: ICP, IMF, UNODC, UN Population Division, WHO, ILO, UNESCO Institute for Statistics) (CC BY 4.0)
• World Bank, Worldwide Governance Indicators, Control of Corruption estimate, CC BY 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)

Cite this page

Borgo, “Living in Tokyo”, https://borgo.abcastor.com/city/tokyo-jp/, figures as of 2026-11-05. Please also name the original source of any figure you use; each is listed above with its licence. Data: tokyo-jp.json.