Retirement payouts in Japan

Retiring at the mandatory retirement age

Average payout (lump sum plus the present value of any corporate pension), by employer size and years of service.

Large employers pay about 2.0× what the smallest ones do at 35 years of service. Years of service matter more than anything else — the schedules are steeply back-loaded, so leaving at 20 years pays far less than half of what 35 years does.

Employer-initiated separation

When the employer ends the relationship — restructuring, early-retirement programmes — payouts are higher than voluntary departure at the same service length.

This is the reason Japanese restructuring is often announced as a "voluntary" early-retirement scheme with an enhanced payout: the enhancement is what persuades people to take it.

How to read this

• These are averages across surveyed employers, not a legal entitlement. There is no statutory retirement payout in Japan. Each employer sets its own rules, and some pay nothing at all.
• Per-company figures do not exist in public data. Annual securities reports do not carry a retirement-payout line that can be compared across companies — the expense sits partly in cost of sales, and the pension obligation is disclosed only in narrative notes. We looked and could not build it honestly.
• Tax treatment is favourable but is a Japanese-resident matter and is not covered here. The Japanese edition has a calculator for it.
• The survey is the National Personnel Authority's 2016 study — the most recent edition of this particular survey, not a current-year figure.

Other benchmarks

Retirement payouts ・ Bonuses ・ Starting salaries ・ Overtime hours ・ Paid leave uptake ・ Men's parental leave ・ Women in management ・ all benchmarks.