Japan Visa Fee Cap to Surge More Than Tenfold Under New Immigration Bill

Japan is planning to sharply raise the legal cap on immigration-related residence fees for foreign nationals — the biggest revision of its kind in more than four decades.

The Cabinet on Tuesday approved a bill to amend immigration law to hike the statutory upper limit for fees to change the status of residence or extend the period of stay to ¥100,000 from ¥10,000, while raising the ceiling for permanent residence applications to ¥300,000, 30 times the current ¥10,000.

The proposed increase marks the first major revision to the statutory ceiling since 1982. While fees had been raised several times within that ceiling, this will be the first increase to the cap, itself.

On April 1 of last year, the fee for the change of status and extension of stay rose from ¥4,000 to ¥6,000, and the permanent residence fee rose from ¥8,000 to ¥10,000.

Agency officials have declined to offer specific figures under the new ceiling but said factors such as period of stay will be considered in deciding fees.

At a briefing Monday, an Immigration Services Agency official told reporters that the government had, so far, managed within the existing cap by calculating fees largely on the basis of administrative costs such as personnel expenses tied to residence examinations.

But with the number of foreign residents surging, even those costs have become harder to cover within the current ceiling. Japan’s foreign resident population stood at a record 4.13 million as of the end of 2025, officials disclosed during the briefing.

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The government is aiming to implement the fee provisions sometime before the end of the next fiscal year on March 31, 2027.

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