Your classmates
The Japanese student sitting next to you spends between ¥1,067,200 and ¥2,689,100 a year
Japan surveys its own students every two years, and leaves international students out on purpose. That exclusion is exactly what makes it useful: it is the cleanest picture there is of the people you would be sitting next to. The 2024 round was published this March. Their income rose 3.2% in two years. What they spend rose 10.7%. And the range hiding inside that average is two and a half times wide, decided almost entirely by two things that have nothing to do with the student.
Everything else on this site is about international students, because that is who the statistics are collected about. This one is the other side of the room. JASSO runs a second survey — the Student Life Survey — of students at Japanese institutions, and its scope note says plainly that it covers working adults returning to study but excludes correspondence courses, students on leave, and international students. So every number below is a domestic classmate.
Two facts decide almost the whole bill
Not the subject. Not the city. Not how hard anyone tries. Whether the university is national, public or private, and whether the student lives at home or in a flat. Here is a year of undergraduate life, daytime programmes, in yen:
| Cost of a year | Living at home | In a flat |
|---|---|---|
| National university | 1,202,600 | 1,800,700 |
| Public (municipal/prefectural) | 1,067,200 | 1,750,600 |
| Private university | 1,905,400 | 2,689,100 |
| All of them | 1,801,300 | 2,342,900 |
¥1,067,200 to ¥2,689,100. Two and a half times, for the same degree in the same country in the same year. Moving out of the parental home costs about ¥540,000 a year on its own — that figure is JASSO's own, and it is almost all living costs rather than fees.
If you are reading this as a prospective international student, the right column is your column. You will not be living at your parents' house. The all-institutions average of ¥2,019,100 that gets quoted in the press includes the 48.3% of Japanese students who are — which is why quoting it at yourself will mislead you by roughly half a million yen.
The squeeze
Compared with the previous round two years earlier:
| Undergraduate, daytime | A year | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Income | 2,030,100 | +3.2% |
| Outgoings | 2,019,100 | +10.7% |
Spending grew more than three times as fast as income. The two averages now sit ¥11,000 apart over a whole year — that subtraction is ours. It is not a savings figure and it does not mean any particular student ended the year with ¥11,000; it means the average of what comes in and the average of what goes out have very nearly met.
The same pattern runs through every institution type. Colleges of technology are the sharpest: outgoings up 15.6% against income up 7.4%.
| A year | Income | Outgoings |
|---|---|---|
| University, daytime | 2,030,100 | 2,019,100 |
| Junior college, daytime | 1,729,500 | 1,624,600 |
| Vocational school | 1,892,800 | 1,806,700 |
| College of technology | 886,900 | 876,400 |
What "outgoings" contains
This is where people misread the survey, so it is worth being exact. JASSO's term is student life expenses, and it is tuition and fees plus living costs, together, in one number. Fees, materials, club costs and commuting on one side; food, rent and utilities, medical, leisure and everything else on the other.
That is why the private-university row is so much higher, and why moving into a flat adds a large amount without any fee changing. It also means you cannot compare this number to a rent-and-food budget. It already has a year of tuition inside it.
Postgraduates
The survey ran a trial round for graduate students in 2024 — JASSO labels it as such, so treat these as provisional rather than settled:
| A year (trial round) | Income | Outgoings |
|---|---|---|
| Master's, no job alongside | 1,893,200 | 1,737,400 |
| Doctorate, no job alongside | 2,665,100 | 2,077,900 |
| Professional degree, no job alongside | 2,130,700 | 1,975,700 |
The doctoral row is the interesting one: income ¥587,200 above outgoings, the widest margin anywhere in the survey. Japanese doctoral students are funded in ways undergraduates are not. That does not automatically extend to you — but if you are weighing a doctorate here, it is a fact worth knowing that the domestic cohort is not scraping.
Why you should not subtract this from your own numbers
The obvious next move is to line these figures up against what international students report. Do not do it arithmetically. Four reasons, all of them fatal to a clean comparison:
- Different surveys, different years. This one was fielded in November 2024 and published in March 2026. The international-student one is the FY2023 living-conditions survey. Prices moved in between — this survey's own headline is that they moved a lot.
- Different populations. The international survey covers privately financed students only. This one covers everybody domestic, including working adults who are studying alongside a job.
- Different questions. "Student life expenses" here bundles tuition with living costs. The international survey reports monthly figures by item. One is not the twelfth of the other.
- A response rate of 18.1%. Fewer than one in five sampled students answered. That is normal for this kind of survey and it is not a reason to throw the numbers away, but it is a reason not to treat ¥11,000 as a precise quantity.
What the two surveys can honestly be used for together is shape, not arithmetic: the order of magnitude of a student year in Japan is around two million yen, the biggest single lever is housing, and the second is public versus private. Those hold in both datasets. The exact yen do not transfer.
Read next
Working out your own year?
The calculator uses the international-student figures rather than these, which is the right way round for you. If a school has quoted you a number and you cannot tell what it includes, send it to us and we will take it apart.
Ask one question →Free, once. No sales call afterwards.
Source. Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), FY2024 Student Life Survey (令和6年度学生生活調査), published 31 March 2026; results page and the summary report, both retrieved 10 August 2026. Fieldwork November 2024. Biennial. Sampled at random and answered online. Effective response rate 18.1% for the student survey including the graduate trial. The scope note states that the survey includes working adult students and excludes correspondence courses, students on leave of absence, and international students. Definitions. "Student life expenses" (学生生活費) is school expenses — tuition, other institutional fees, study materials, extracurricular costs and commuting — plus living expenses — food, housing and utilities, medical, leisure and other daily costs including communications. The income and expenditure figures cover the twelve months from December 2023 to November 2024. The housing table is reproduced from the survey's summary report, undergraduate daytime programmes, in yen per year. The ¥540,000 gap between living at home and living in a flat is JASSO's own statement (they give it as 54万円). Halls of residence are grouped with flats rather than with living at home. 48.3% of respondents lived at home. Postgraduate figures are from the trial graduate round conducted alongside the main survey and are labelled as provisional by JASSO. "No job alongside" renders 一般の学生 — students who have never worked or have left work to study — as against 社会人学生, who are studying while employed and whose figures are much larger on both sides. Our arithmetic. The ¥11,000 gap is 2,030,100 minus 2,019,100, and the "2.5 times" is 2,689,100 divided by 1,067,200. Both are our subtraction and division of published figures, not published figures themselves. What this article is not. A description of what a domestic student year costs, and a warning against comparing it item-by-item with the international-student surveys used elsewhere on this site. It is not a budget for you.