Year-End Tax Adjustment in Japan

Those who live in Japan probably know how painful it’s to do Tax Adjustment in Japan. Especially for non-Japanese speakers when the documents are not written in Japanese and when all your friends don’t speak Japanese.

We will give you some tips on your Year-End Tax Adjustment process. We do Year-End Tax Adjustment for all our dispatch staff at the end of a year.

This procedure which helps to adjust your taxes for a year.

As you know, in Japan you are required to pay the health insurance and basically, a company should deduct taxes, social insurance, pension, income tax and residence tax from your salary.

If you don’t do Year-End Tax Adjustment then you won’t get a tax return or your tax may be more expensive than it supposed to be. In some cases the certain amount will be deducted if you had any changes in your monthly payment or used to send money overseas but don’t do this anymore; cases like having a dependent and etc.

Those who pay additional fees (other than your social insurance), always should check if they received a card with the amount you paid within a year.

This is very important for the Year-End Tax Adjustment to count the taxes correctly.

You will have to send this card to your company or bring it to an agency which you ask to do this procedure for you in case if you freelancer or work on several jobs. It would be necessary for you to bring that card to proceed correctly with your Tax Adjustment. In case if you lost it, the taxes will not be returned to the subject you paid.

If you pay additional insurance, this card could be Life Insurance Payments (生命保険料) or Earthquake insurance Deduction Certificates (地震保険料等), National Pension Payment Certificate (国民年金保険料の支払証明書) for those who paid National pension while being unemployed, Declaration of mortgage deduction (住宅ローン控除の申告書) and etc.

If you send money to your family overseas you will have to prepare the evidence for 12 months about money transfers to get a tax return.

Some companies don’t take care of your Year-End Tax Adjustment, but in this case, you will have to go to the Tax Agency to do that. In Japanese, it called  “Kakutei shinkoku” (確定申告).