The Atarashift Blog
Insights for working in Japan
Guides, interviews, and honest advice for international talent building a career in Japan.
The Atarashift Blog
Guides, interviews, and honest advice for international talent building a career in Japan.
Japan caps overtime at 45 hours a month, backed by criminal penalties. Full-time workers average 13.2 hours, but transport runs three times manufacturing.
Japanese law caps overtime at 45 hours a month and 360 hours a year, and those caps carry criminal penalties rather than being guidelines. The average full-time worker in Japan actually logs 13.2 hours of overtime a month (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Monthly Labour Survey, 2025 preliminary annual results, 2026).
That gap between Japan's reputation and Japan's payroll data is the whole story. Long hours have not disappeared, but they have concentrated. They now sit in specific industries, specific contract structures, and specific job titles, and you can check all three before you sign anything.
Key Takeaways
- Statutory hours are 8 per day and 40 per week. Anything beyond that is overtime and requires a filed 36 Agreement.
- Overtime is capped at 45 hours a month and 360 a year. A special clause can raise this to 720 hours a year, but never above 100 hours in a single month.
- Full-time workers averaged 13.2 hours of overtime a month in 2025. Annual hours per employee fell from 2,064 in 1990 to 1,620 in 2025.
- The share of workers putting in 60-hour weeks is 17.7% in transport and 4.9% in manufacturing. Industry predicts your hours better than nationality or company size.
- Overtime pay starts at a 25% premium and reaches 50% beyond 60 hours in a month. Fixed overtime allowances do not remove that obligation.
Eight hours a day and 40 hours a week, excluding breaks. This is Article 32 of the Labour Standards Act, and it applies to you regardless of nationality or visa status. Work beyond either limit is statutory overtime and must be paid at a premium.
There is one narrow exception. Small workplaces in retail, food service, healthcare and entertainment with fewer than 10 employees may schedule 44 hours a week (JETRO, Legislation on working hours, breaks and days off). If your contract says 44, check that your employer qualifies.
Your contracted hours may also be shorter than the statutory ceiling. Many Japanese offices run a 7.5-hour day. Hours between your contracted finish and the 8-hour line are still paid. They are not legally premium overtime, though, which is why some payslips carry two overtime rows.
A 36 Agreement (36協定, saburoku kyotei) is the written labour-management agreement that permits overtime at all. Without one on file with the local Labour Standards Inspection Office, your employer cannot lawfully ask for a single minute past 40 hours.
This matters more than it sounds. The 36 Agreement is where your company declares its own overtime ceiling. That figure is often lower than the legal maximum. It is a document, it has a number in it, and you are entitled to know the number.
Employers must make the agreement available, usually posted in the workplace or on the intranet. Asking to see it during onboarding is normal. It tells you more about your future hours than any conversation about culture.
Forty-five hours a month and 360 hours a year. The Work Style Reform legislation turned these into hard legal caps. They bound large companies from April 2019 and smaller ones from April 2020. Before that, the same numbers were administrative guidance with nothing behind them.
A 36 Agreement can include a "special clause" (特別条項) for temporary surges. Even then, four absolute limits apply:
| Limit | Ceiling |
|---|---|
| Overtime per year | 720 hours |
| Overtime plus statutory holiday work, single month | Under 100 hours |
| Overtime plus holiday work, average over any 2 to 6 consecutive months | 80 hours per month |
| Months allowed to exceed 45 hours | 6 per year |
Breaching these is a criminal offence under the Labour Standards Act. It carries up to six months' imprisonment or a fine of up to ¥300,000. Most English-language writing on Japanese work culture has not caught up with that change.
Three sectors held a five-year grace period and lost it in April 2024. Japanese media called it the "2024 problem." Truck and bus drivers now face a 960-hour annual cap, doctors a similar ceiling, and construction came fully under the standard rules (RIETI, Outlook on the 2024 Problem).
Far less than the stereotype, and much less than a generation ago. In 2025, full-time workers averaged 13.2 hours of overtime a month against 147.3 total hours worked. Across all employment types including part-timers, the overtime figure was 9.8 hours.
The long view is more striking. Annual hours worked per employee have fallen steadily for three decades:
| Year | Total annual hours | Of which overtime | Days attended |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | 2,064 | 156 | 257 |
| 2000 | 1,853 | 118 | 240 |
| 2010 | 1,754 | 120 | 228 |
| 2019 | 1,669 | 127 | 216 |
| 2025 | 1,620 | 118 | 209 |
Japanese employees now attend work 48 fewer days a year than in 1990. Part of that fall reflects the rising share of part-timers in the average, so it overstates the change for any one full-timer. The direction still holds.
The government also tracks the sharper end. Among employees working more than 40 hours a week, the share exceeding 60 hours fell to 8.0% in 2024. In 2003 it was 17.9%, and the official target is 5% (MHLW, 2025 White Paper on Measures to Prevent Karoshi, 2025).
This is the question that actually predicts your life, and the spread is enormous. Here is the share of employees working more than 60 hours a week in 2024, by industry:
| Industry | Share working 60+ hours a week |
|---|---|
| Transport and postal services | 17.7% |
| Accommodation, eating and drinking services | 15.1% |
| Education and learning support | 13.9% |
| Government | 10.9% |
| Construction | 8.2% |
| Wholesale and retail trade | 7.9% |
| Scientific research, professional and technical services | 7.9% |
| Real estate and goods rental | 7.7% |
| Finance and insurance | 6.3% |
| Information and communications | 5.8% |
| Medical, health care and welfare | 5.0% |
| Manufacturing | 4.9% |
The number worth remembering: a transport worker is roughly three and a half times more likely to work a 60-hour week than someone in manufacturing. Both are covered by identical law. The variable is the industry, not the statute.
This matters for foreign professionals specifically. Most English-speaking hires in Japan land in information and communications, which sits at 5.8%, below the 8.0% national figure. The Japan of the karoshi headlines and the Japan most foreign engineers actually join are different labour markets. If you are still weighing sectors, our breakdown of which jobs are most in demand in Japan is a useful companion to this table.
Overtime carries a statutory premium on top of your hourly base rate, and the premiums stack. The rates are fixed by law, not negotiable:
| Type of work | Premium |
|---|---|
| Overtime, standard | 25% |
| Overtime beyond 60 hours in a month | 50% |
| Work on a statutory day off | 35% |
| Late night, 22:00 to 05:00 | 25% |
| Late-night overtime | 50% |
| Late night on a statutory day off | 60% |
| Late-night overtime beyond 60 hours | 75% |
The 50% rate beyond 60 monthly hours applied only to large companies until April 2023, when it was extended to small and medium-sized employers. Every company in Japan is now subject to it, which removed one of the main reasons smaller firms tolerated heavy overtime.
Fixed overtime (みなし残業 or 固定残業代) is a flat monthly allowance covering a set number of overtime hours, paid whether or not you work them. It is legal, common, and the single most misread line in a Japanese job offer.
For it to be valid, three things must be true:
A clause that fails any of these can be struck down entirely. But the practical trap is arithmetic, not legality. Take an offer of ¥5,000,000 that bundles in ¥900,000 of fixed overtime for 45 hours a month. That is really a ¥4,100,000 base salary with a heavy expectation attached, and on a job board it looks identical to a genuine ¥5,000,000 offer.
Two questions resolve it. How much of this figure is fixed overtime, and how many hours does it cover? Both belong in the offer conversation, alongside the other points in our guide to salary negotiation in Japan.
Not fully. Employees classified as 管理監督者 (kanri kantokusha), meaning genuine managerial supervisors, are exempt from the working-hour limits and from standard overtime premiums. They do keep the late-night premium for work between 22:00 and 05:00.
The exemption is much narrower than the job title suggests. Courts look at whether you have real authority over hiring and working conditions, genuine discretion over your own schedule, and compensation that reflects the role. A team lead with a manager title and no such authority is a 名ばかり管理職, a manager in name only, and the exemption does not apply.
Check this carefully when a managerial title arrives at a salary barely above the non-managerial band. The title may be removing your overtime pay without adding anything else.
Yes, but the shape of the risk has changed. In the year to March 2025, Japan recorded 1,030 workers' compensation claims for overwork-related brain and heart conditions. Of those, 241 were approved and 67 involved a death.
Claims for work-related mental disorders ran far higher: 3,780 claims and 1,055 approvals. That was the first time approvals passed 1,000, and the sixth consecutive annual increase. Eighty-eight involved suicide or attempted suicide.
The leading trigger was not hours at all. Power harassment from supervisors drove 224 approved cases, up 42.7% year on year. Customer harassment roughly doubled to 108. Physical overwork is declining slowly, while psychological injury is rising fast, and it is now the larger category by a factor of four.
Set against roughly 60 million employees, some 1,300 annual approvals is statistically rare. It is also concentrated. The white paper names vehicle driving and food service as the sectors where cases involving 80-plus monthly overtime hours cluster most tightly.
Company-level averages are close to useless, because hours vary far more between teams than between employers. These questions get you to something real:
The hours data misses one thing entirely: unpaid social time. Drinking with colleagues sits outside working hours and outside the caps. Expectations vary enormously by employer, as our guide to nomikai and after-work culture explains. Several of these points also work well as interview questions, and our list of common Japanese interview questions covers how that conversation usually runs.
If something is clearly wrong after you start, the escalation path is short and free. The Labour Standards Inspection Office (労働基準監督署) has authority over your employer, takes unpaid overtime complaints directly, and charges nothing. Keep your own record of hours. In a dispute, contemporaneous notes make the burden of proof far easier to meet.
Forty-five hours in an ordinary month. A 36 Agreement with a special clause lets an employer exceed that in up to six months a year. Even then, overtime plus statutory holiday work must stay under 100 hours in any single month. It must also average no more than 80 hours across any two to six consecutive months.
No. Unpaid overtime, known as サービス残業 (service zangyo), is a violation of the Labour Standards Act regardless of whether you agreed to it. Your consent does not make it lawful, and the Labour Standards Inspection Office accepts complaints about it free of charge.
Yes. The Labour Standards Act applies to everyone working in Japan on the basis of the workplace, not the worker's nationality or visa status. Your rights to premium pay, capped hours and a filed 36 Agreement are identical.
The average full-time employee worked 147.3 hours a month in 2025, roughly 34 hours a week, including 13.2 hours of monthly overtime. About 8.0% of employees working over 40 hours a week exceed 60 hours, concentrated in transport, hospitality and education.
No. A fixed overtime allowance covers a stated number of hours only. Hours beyond that number must be paid separately at the full statutory premium. A clause that fails to state the covered hours and the amount may be invalid entirely.
Generally not, if a valid 36 Agreement exists and the request is reasonable and within the caps. You can refuse work that would breach the legal limits, and employers cannot penalise you for declining overtime that exceeds what the agreement permits.
Japan's overtime law is now stricter than its reputation, and stricter than most countries'. Hard caps, criminal penalties, premiums up to 75%, and three decades of falling hours have moved the baseline a long way.
What has not moved is the variance. The gap between transport at 17.7% and manufacturing at 4.9% dwarfs any gap between Japan and comparable economies. Your industry, your team and the wording of your contract will set your hours. The national average will not.
So treat the karoshi reputation as a reason to ask precise questions, not a reason to stay away. Ask what the 36 Agreement says. Ask how much of the salary is fixed overtime. Ask what time people actually leave. Employers worth joining answer all three without hesitating.
Sources
This article is general information, not legal advice. For a dispute about your own hours or pay, consult your local Labour Standards Inspection Office (労働基準監督署) or a qualified employment lawyer.
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