"Đi Nhật 3 năm về được bao nhiêu tiền?" asks how much money three years in Japan bring home. Google suggests that question in Vietnamese for one, three, four, five, seven and ten years, and in Indonesian as "kerja di Jepang 3 tahun dapat uang berapa". The answers I found were articles with three or four fixed examples. So I added a savings calculator to Japan Life Hub, in its seven languages.
Your pay and your rent
Start from the average basic pay of a technical intern trainee, a specified skilled worker or all foreign workers, from the labour ministry's 2025 wage survey, or type your own. Add overtime, bonuses, the city, how you live and your rent or dormitory fee. If going to Japan cost you an agency fee or a loan you still owe, enter it in your own currency and it comes off the total.
What the total is made of
The total is what you save over the years, plus the pension lump sum you can claim when you leave (it counts at most 60 months), plus the 20.42 % tax on it that a tax return brings back later. Each part is in yen and in your currency at the Ministry of Finance's rate for the month.
Under it you see one month line by line, in the first year and from the second, when resident tax starts, and then the years one by one.
Rent decides most of it
At a trainee's basic pay of ¥190,300 with 10 hours of overtime, a studio in Tokyo's 23 wards at the survey's ¥100,000 leaves you ¥11,963 short every month of the first year. With a ¥30,000 dormitory, the same pay brings home ¥2,572,332 after three years. The table under the calculator gives 1 to 10 years for the three survey pays in Kagoshima, the city in the middle of the 78 by cost.
From 10 years of pension cover there is no lump sum: you have earned a Japanese pension instead.
