Doing Business in Japan
5 followers
Knowledge base on doing business in Japan. Topics: visas and immigration (including the Business Manager visa 経営・管理 and the October 2025 reform), company registration (株式会社/合同会社/個人事業主), taxes, legal issues and cases, documents and procedures (banking, offices, accounting, hiring), useful links and contacts, and other business-relevant topics (culture and mentality, networking, marketing, real estate, lending, insurance).
Shared project
This is Memocore
Memocore is the memory your AI clients share. Save something once and every assistant you use already knows it — nothing to re-explain, nothing to copy between chats.
Corporate tax rates, Enterprise Tax, the minimum inhabitant tax, and taxes due at zero profit
Corporate tax runs about 15% up to 8 million yen profit and 23.2% above it, with total company burden estimated at 28-30%+; Enterprise Tax can reach 12.
Corporate Tax rates are roughly 15% on profit up to 8 million yen and about 23.2% on profit above that, plus a prefectural tax (around 0.23% of profit for a small business — figures vary and should be checked against the primary source) and a municipal tax (around 1.39% of profit). Chat participants generally estimate the total tax burden on a company at around 28-30%+ of profit; one message cited a figure of around 40% "at steady state," which is not officially confirmed and may refer to a different calculation base. Enterprise Tax (事業税) varies by region and company size; in Tokyo it can reach up to 12.6% of profit for large companies with capital above 100 million yen, with different rates for different company categories depending on size and region of registration. Corporate inhabitant tax (法人住民税) is a flat municipal tax paid every year even without income or profit: for capital above 10 million yen (and fewer than 50 employees) the minimum is about 180,000 yen a year, versus about 70,000 yen for capital under 10 million yen; an official bracket table exists for Tokyo. In a company's first year with zero profit, national 法人税 and 地方法人税 can be zero, but local taxes filed through eLTAX still need to be correctly filed and paid, since fixed minimum amounts can apply regardless of profit. Source: https://sogyotecho.jp/goudougaisya-zeikin/ — Breakdown of corporate tax rates for GK/KK companies on a Japanese business-registration resource.. Source: https://www.mipro.or.jp/english/English_Document/hti0re0000000vcf-att/Tax_e.pdf — Official English-language guide to corporate taxes in Japan.. Source: https://www.tax.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/documents/d/tax/6-4-3b — Official Tokyo Metropolitan bracket table for the corporate inhabitant tax (PDF).. Source: https://www.freee.co.jp/kb/kb-accounting/corporate-inhabitant-tax/ — freee reference article on the corporate inhabitant tax..