Guide
What buying property in Japan actually costs
You can find the asking price of a house in Japan in about ten seconds. Everything after that is harder.
The fees at closing, the taxes that arrive later, what it costs to keep the place standing, what comes back if you let it, and what the tax office takes when you sell. Most of it is public. Almost none of it is written down in a language you read, in one place, in order. This page does that.
Every rate below comes from the ministry, the tax agency or the statute that sets it, read on 2 September 2026. The temporary ones carry their expiry date.
The bill at closing
The brokerage commission has a ceiling, and the ceiling is all the law fixes. A notice from the land ministry caps what one agent may take from one client. The maximum is 5.5% of the portion of the price up to 2 million yen, 4.4% of the portion between 2 and 4 million, and 3.3% of everything above, consumption tax included. The ceiling runs per client, which is what lets one agent act for both sides and take up to it from each.
Cheap houses work differently. Since 1 July 2024, where the land or building is priced at 8 million yen or less, the agent may take up to 330,000 yen including tax from the client who engaged it, whatever state the building is in. That ceiling is higher than the ordinary formula would give on a house that cheap, so on a small price the fee is a larger share of it.
The ceiling covers the brokerage and nothing else. Work agreed under a separate written contract, kept distinct from the brokerage mandate, sits outside the fee rules, which is where a survey or a build gets priced.
Stamp duty on the contract is fixed in bands. A contract of over 10 million and up to 50 million yen carries 10,000 yen, and the band above it, to 100 million yen, carries 30,000 yen. Both are temporary reductions running to 31 March 2027, against standard amounts of 20,000 and 60,000 yen.
Registration is where the English-language advice is most often wrong. Transfer of the land is taxed at 2.0%, reduced to 1.5% for registrations completed by 31 March 2029, with no condition about living there. The building is taxed at that same 2.0%. The 0.3% rate applies only to an individual who buys a home and moves into it, on registrations by 31 March 2027, at 50 m² and above. Buy it to let, and the building is 2.0%.
Registration tax is charged on the value in the fixed-asset tax ledger, not on the price you paid. So is the acquisition tax, which the prefecture sends a few months later. The standard rate is 4%, and until 31 March 2027 land and residential buildings are charged 3%, non-residential buildings stay at 4%, and the base for residential land is halved.
A used home carries a deduction of up to 12 million yen off that base, and only if you live in it yourself. The deduction shrinks with the age of the house, and one finished before 1 July 1954 gets none. Below an assessed value of 160,000 yen for the land or 340,000 yen for the building you buy, no acquisition tax is charged, for acquisitions from 1 April 2026. A house finished before 1982 also needs a seismic certificate before the deduction applies.
The judicial scrivener who files the registration works to no official scale. The only rule is that the office shows you the basis of its fees before taking the job, so ask for it when you ask for the price.
Land never carries consumption tax. Whether the building does depends on who is selling, because the tax applies to a sale made by a business in the course of business.
One line on the closing statement has no statute behind it at all. Fixed asset tax for the year is owed by whoever owned the property on 1 January, so the buyer customarily reimburses the seller for the part of the year after handover. That apportionment is a custom of the contract, and it can be argued like any other term.
moogo holds its own brokerage licence, 京都府知事(1)第15131号, so the contract and the registration stay in one office instead of passing to a translator at the point it gets difficult, and any work beyond the brokerage, renovation included, is quoted in its own written contract.
The closing bill in full detail, item by item: What you pay beyond the price.
Every year you own it
Two taxes arrive every year, both charged on the assessed value rather than what you paid. Fixed asset tax has a standard rate of 1.4%, which each municipality sets by its own ordinance; Kyoto City levies 1.4%. City planning tax applies inside urbanization promotion areas and cannot go above 0.3%; Kyoto City levies 0.3%. Residential land may be assessed on a reduced base, a third or a sixth of the value in some cases, and the fraction differs between the two taxes. Each municipality publishes its own rate, as Kyoto City does on its fixed asset tax page.
One date governs both: the owner on 1 January owes the whole year, so a sale in February does not move that year’s bill to the buyer.
A unit in a block comes with two monthly charges set by the building rather than by law. The land ministry’s national condominium survey for fiscal 2023 puts the average management fee at 11,503 yen a month per unit and the average repair reserve at 13,054 yen, before amounts covered out of parking income. Those are national averages and not set amounts; your building’s own rules decide yours. The same survey found the reserve on a stepped, increasing schedule in 47.1% of buildings, so the figure quoted at the viewing may not be the figure you pay later.
Insurance has one half with a published price and one half without. Earthquake cover attaches to a fire policy at 30% to 50% of that policy’s sum insured, capped at 50 million yen on the building and 10 million yen on contents. For policies starting on or after 1 October 2022, the published base rate runs per 10 million yen of cover for a year. In Kyoto that is 7,300 yen for a steel or concrete building and 11,200 yen for a wooden one, against 27,500 and 41,100 yen for the same two in Tokyo.
What the place earns depends on the place. What the rules fix are the two deductions taken out of that rent before it reaches you. An agent arranging a lease may take up to 1.1 months’ rent in total from the two parties, and on a residential lease no more than 0.55 months from either party, unless that party agreed otherwise when the agent took the mandate. Where the property has stood empty for more than about a year, that total ceiling doubles to 2.2 months.
Rent paid to someone living outside Japan is taxed at source. The payer must withhold 20.42% and pay it to the tax office, normally by the 10th of the month after payment. The duty applies to a company and an individual alike. An individual renting the place as a home for themselves or a relative is exempt, which is why it lands, in practice, on whoever manages the property.
moogo manages the letting and the bills that arrive in Japanese, and reports what happened in the language you read.
The yearly side in full detail: What owning costs every year.
The day you sell
The tax on your gain turns on a date most sellers read wrong. A holding counts as long-term only if you had owned it for more than 5 years on 1 January of the year you sell. Buy in June 2020 and sell in July 2025, and the calendar says 5 years and a month, but on 1 January 2025 you were still inside the 5 years, so the sale is taxed as short-term.
On a long-term gain, national income tax is 15% and residence tax is 5%. On a short-term gain the same two are 30% and 9%. A reconstruction surtax of 2.1% of the base income tax amount sits on top of the national half, for tax years from 2013 to 2037.
The two halves stand apart here because the second one follows your address. Residence tax is levied under the local tax law on a person who has an address in the municipality on 1 January of the year. Whether it applies to you depends on where you were registered as living on that date. Ask the municipality and your own tax accountant where you stand before you plan around a single number.
If you cannot document what you paid, the tax office lets you treat 5% of the sale price as the acquisition cost, which usually leaves a far larger taxable gain. The building’s acquisition cost also comes down by the depreciation accrued over the years you held it, so the taxable gain grows even when the price does not. Keep the purchase contract and the receipts from the day you buy; they are worth more at the sale than at the purchase.
Discharging a mortgage from the register costs 1,000 yen per property, so a house on its own plot is 2,000 yen, and a unit in a block adds 1,000 yen for each separate land right attached to it.
The buyer withholds from you as well. Anyone buying land or a building from a non-resident must withhold 10.21% of the price and pay it to the tax office. The exemption is narrow: an individual buying it as a home for themselves or a relative, at 100 million yen or less. You settle the withheld amount in your final return, so it is not lost, but the proceeds that reach you on the day are short by that much.
Because moogo holds the licence itself, the office that bought the property can sell it, and the withholding is set out on the closing statement.
Selling as a non-resident, in full detail: Selling from abroad.
Owning it from abroad
Since 1 April 2024 the registry asks a foreign owner for documents a Japanese owner never has to produce. You have no residence record in a Japanese municipality. The registry takes either a document from the government of your country or your country of residence proving your address, or an affidavit of address notarized there and filed with a copy of your passport. Anything in another language needs a translation. Where your country has no notary system, a Japanese notary can do the work.
The same rules ask for a contact inside Japan. An application registering an overseas owner names a domestic contact and attaches that person’s consent and seal certificate, and where there is no such person, the application says so. The role can be filled by a company, and the rules contemplate a real estate firm or a judicial scrivener. A foreign owner also files the roman-letter spelling of their name, which then stands on the register.
One obligation has a deadline, and it widened in 2026.
Within 20 days of acquiring real estate in Japan, or a right relating to it, a non-resident files a report with the Minister of Finance through the Bank of Japan. Since 1 April 2026 it applies whatever the purpose and whatever the amount or size, where the earlier rule covered investment purchases only. Read the exemptions carefully: they now cover only rights over property, such as a lease or a land lease, held for your own home, for non-profit work carried on in Japan, or for your own office. Buying the property itself is reportable in every case, including a home you intend to live in, and the ministry says so in a footnote to its own guidance. Buying from another non-resident, which used to sit on the exemption list, no longer does.
Filing anything else in Japan from abroad starts with a tax agent. You appoint one on a form filed with the tax office that has jurisdiction over your Japanese tax base. The office then sends its correspondence to that agent, though your return still goes to the tax office as before.
moogo is the property arm of 081株式会社, which has run homes in Kyoto since 2019 and holds more than 850 guest reviews averaging 4.97. An owner can move to another manager at any time, and none has. The brokerage licence is newer, granted in April 2026, and this site carries no sold-count because there is nothing yet to count.
Tell us which property you are looking at, and we will run these numbers against it, in the language you read. moogo is based in Kyoto and buys and sells anywhere in Japan.
If you would rather start from what is on the market in Kyoto right now, browse homes.