Software Developer Salaries in Japan

Image: Amanda Narumi Fujii

Understanding what software salaries developer in Japan are be tricky. As a whole, software development doesn’t pay exceptionally well: according to a 2023 survey conducted by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare of Japan found, the average annual salary of software engineers in Japan is ¥5.2 million. This puts it a bit above the overall average salary of ¥4.8 million.

At the same time though, TokyoDev’s own survey of English-speaking international software developers in Japan found that the median salary of respondents was ¥8.5 million. This difference stems from our respondents being anything but typical. For instance, only 69% of them worked at a company headquartered in Japan, 79% of them used English frequently, and 82% of them worked on an engineering team where many of the members were non-Japanese.

This makes answering the question of what is a reasonable software developer salary in Japan difficult. If you were a “typical” Japanese software developer with three years of experience, a salary of ¥4 million may sound reasonable. And yet if you ask the international developers on TokyoDev’s Discord if the offer is reasonable, you’re likely to be told it is on the low side and you can probably do better.

So with that in mind, I think it’s important to get an overview of the market both for exceptional English-speaking international software developers, and typical Japanese ones. This article will compare TokyoDev’s own findings about software engineer salaries, with that of other Japanese sources.

Trends in Compensation for Software Developers in Japan

Since the first comprehensive survey TokyoDev conducted in 2019, salaries have been trending significantly upward until 2022, with the median increasing from ¥7.0 million to ¥9.5 million (a 36% increase). In our 2023 results, the median compensation decreased for the first time, to ¥8.5 million.

One factor that may be connected to this decrease in our most recent results is that the median respondent had 5 years of professional software development experience, down from 7 years from 2022’s survey. Another factor may be an increase in the number of respondents working for Japanese headquartered company, from 63% in 2022 to 69% in 2023. As we found that respondents who work at an international subsidiary had a median compensation of ¥13 million, whereas those working at a Japanese company had a median of ¥7.5 million, a lower percentage of respondents working for them lowers the overall median compensation of respondents.

Comparison: The Wage Structure Basic Statistical Survey

The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare of Japan conducts the Wage Structure Basic Statistical Survey annually. While this survey is not without flaws, it does collect data on a massive scale, having most recently collected approximately six hundred thousand respondents who are classified as “software creators” (defined as those engaged in specification determination, design, and programming work for software creation).

The survey found that the average compensation of software creators increased from ¥4.8 million to ¥5.2 million (an 8% increase) between 2020 and 2023. While it is not as striking as our findings, it suggests that the market overall has been moving to increase the pay of software developers.

Unfortunately data from 2019 and before isn’t directly comparable, as there was no “software creator” classification, only a “programmer” one. As the mean compensation for programmers in 2019 was ¥3.9 million, it seems likely that the respondents themselves are quite different. Traditionally in Japan, the word “programmer” has referred to someone who’s job it is to take a specification and turn it into code, without doing anything else (think the way software was written in the punch card days), so by that definition, it is no wonder they were paid less.

Salary by Experience

Experience is one of the most important factors in determining your salary as a developer, and so looking at it can be a good place to start when you’re trying to judge your value in the market. We found that among junior developers (less than one year of experience), the median compensation was ¥4.5 million, while among senior developers (seven to nine years of experience), the median rose to ¥9.5 million.

Comparison: The Wage Structure Basic Statistical Survey

The 2023 Wage Structure Basic Statistical Survey found that the mean compensation of software creators with no experience was ¥3.7 million. This was quite a large jump from 2022, where it was ¥3.0 million. As the numbers for other levels of experience were similar, I’m not sure if this change reflects an actual shift in the market, or represents a change in who answered the survey.

While the salary gap between there data and ours isn’t so big for starting positions, it increases dramatically with experience. While their respondents with 15+ years of experience earn a mean of ¥6.2 million, our respondents with 4 - 6 years of experience earn a median of ¥7.5 million. Though their figures aren’t quite analogous to ours, they do highlight just how different the “typical” compensation for software developers in Japan is compared to that of international developers.

Comparison: Qiita’s Engineer White Paper 2023

Qiita is a service that is popular among Japanese developers to record and share knowledge. Their Engineer White Paper 2023 is based on a survey they conducted of their users, and has over 2,700 responses.

Their data is interesting as their audience is fairly analogous to TokyoDev, with the exception of being from Japanese not international developers. The kind of people who use their site are likely motivated engineers who care about their craft, and not just people who are doing it because their company decided they should do software development (Japanese companies have a history of assigning employees to be software developers regardless of interest or aptitude).

As their report shows what percentage of respondents fit into a given salary range, it is a bit hard to compare with our data. But it is apparent that their respondents made less than ours. For instance, while we found more than 50% of our respondents with 10-12 years of experience made ¥10 million or over, only 13% of their respondents with 10+ years of experience did.

Salary by Age

In Japan, there has traditionally been lifetime employment, and as employees could expect their compensation to increase with seniority, it was also essentially tied to their age. When I first came to Japan, I heard the typical formula was age x ¥10,000 per month. So as a 23 year old, a salary of ¥230,000 per month would be typical.

At least among the kind of companies employing TokyoDev respondents though, I have the impression that age has less of a bearing than experience. I’m including our data for salary by age primarily as a way to compare with other Japanese sources.

Comparison: Forkwell

Forkwell offers a platform for Japanese software engineers looking to change jobs. They’ve released a report that analyzes the data of 10,000 registered users, including a salary breakdown based on age.

Again, our respondents consistently made more than theirs. The gap was least pronounced among the youngest respondents, with ours having a median 31% more than theirs, but among the 30-34 year old respondents, the median salary of our respondents was 79% more than theirs.

Salary by Gender

Only 10% of our respondents were women (72 respondents in total). While we saw that women had a lower median compensation than men, these women also had a median of 2 years of experience compared to 8 years for men.

While I would have liked to drill into this topic further, the limited data we have to work with made that impossible, especially while maintaining our goal of ensuring anonymity of our respondents.

We do have an article on the subjective experiences of women working as software engineers in Japan, and generally the international women we talked to had positive experiences here.

Comparison: The Wage Structure Basic Statistical Survey

The Wage Structure Basic Statistical Survey provides a breakdown of compensation by experience and gender. We used this to calculate the wage gap, and saw that women software creators earn less than men across all levels of experience.

Due to how wildly the wage gap fluctuates from year to year though, it’s hard to make any more meaningful conclusions from this data. It is disconcerting to see the overall wage gap trending upwards though.

Conversely, the representation of female software creators is trending upwards, with women making up 21% of respondents in 2023.

This growth seems most pronounced among women with under 10 years of experience. For instance, women with 5-9 years of experience made up 18% of respondents in 2021, but 28% of respondents in 2023.

Comparison: Forkwell

Forkwell worked with bgrass, an organization working to close the gender gap in tech, to conduct a survey of 311 male and 126 female engineers. The survey measured “theoretical annual income”, calculated by deriving the hourly wage of an engineer from their average annual income, the number of working days per week, and the working hours per day, and then converting it into an annual income figure assuming full-time work.

Their data paints a similar picture to The Wage Structure Basic Statistical Survey, where women in the middle of their career have the biggest wage gap. Only 27% of women with 5-9 years of experience made more than ¥5 million, while 47% of men did.

In addition to experience, they also explored how the kind of company a women works at affects the wage gap, and found that outsourcing companies had a particularly large gender gap when compared to those that made their own IT/Web service. In these outsourcing companies only 11% of women made more than ¥5 million, while 39% of men did.

Salary by Type of Company

One reason why our respondents have such higher pay than other sources is the type of company they worked for. Notably, 22% worked for a subsidiary of an international company, and 6% for a company without any legal entity in Japan. It seems obvious to me that it is much higher than that for the overall market for software engineers (though I didn’t find any data to back this).

This is significant as we found that the median compensation of respondents at internationally headquartered companies was almost twice of that of domestically headquartered ones!

While the compensation of Japanese companies seems quite stable, that of international subsidiaries has fluctuated quite a bit over the years. In 2020, they were paying ¥9 million and in 2023 they were paying ¥13 million (down ¥1.5 million from the previous year). Compared to Japanese companies, they were paying 38% more in 2020 and 73% in 2023.

Salary by Employer Size

We found that salaries increased with the number of employees at the employer. Respondents at companies with 10-19 employees had a median compensation of ¥6.5 million, while those at 10,000 or more had a median of ¥12.5 million.

Comparison: The Wage Structure Basic Statistical Survey

The Wage Structure Basic Statistical Survey also found that compensation increased with employee count. Respondents at companies with 1000 employees or more made on average 10% more than those at companies with 10 - 99 employees. In 2022, the difference in average was 47% more for big companies, but again it is hard to tell if this is a change in the companies sampled, or reflective of a shift in the market.

Salary by Role

We found that respondents who worked as Engineering Managers had the highest compensation. This can be explained in part by them having the most experience. Data scientists stood out as having high median compensation while low median experience.

Comparison: Robert Half

The recruiting company Robert Half publishes a salary guide for software engineering positions in Japan, and weren’t so significantly different than ours. As they target bilingual people working for higher paying roles, this isn’t surprising.

Salary by Educational Background

While having a computer science or related degree is helpful for getting a visa in Japan, it doesn’t seem to be so relevant in terms of compensation.

A Master’s degree may lead to a bump in salary over having just a Bachelor’s degree, but when considering the opportunity cost of picking up a couple years more experience, it probably isn’t a worthwhile investment from a compensation perspective.

Salary by Japanese Ability

We found that Japanese ability didn’t have a strong correlation with salary.

Salary by Japanese Usage

On the other hand, we did find that Japanese usage on the job negatively correlated with compensation: respondents who used Japanese less tended to be compensated more.

This may be as a result of the kind of company these respondents are working for. 29% of respondents who never used Japanese professionally worked for international subsidiaries, whereas among those who frequently used Japanese, only 12% did.

Salary by Programming Language

We found that respondents who used Kotlin had the highest compensation, while those using PHP or C# were paid the least.

Comparison: Forkwell

In Forkwell’s report, they broke down salary by programming language and age. They found that Go developers consistently made the most, and PHP developers made the least.

Comparison: Qiita’s Engineer White Paper 2022

In Qiita’s Engineer White Paper 2023, they found that more than 25% of Go and Rust developers make ¥8 million or more per year.