The average salary for a Software Engineer in Japan is a complicated question, where the company size, industry, programming languages, and spoken language proficiency affects salary in significant ways. Generally speaking, as a new graduate / junior engineers (below 3 years of experience), you are looking at a salary of 3.5M to 6.5M JPY.
General trends of the market
Why is there a large range? Well, as previously mentioned many factors impact your salary and the general trends of the market that determine salary are:
- Internet/SaaS companies tend to pay a higher salary
- Gaishikei (foreign companies) and Nikkei (Japanese companies) with global operation tend to pay a higher salary
- Companies with an international development team (works in English) tend to pay higher compared to development teams that work purely in Japanese
Average salary for Software Engineer
From our experience as technical recruiters, we have experienced that generally speaking below are the average salary for Software Engineer in Japan.
- New graduate – 2 years of experience: 3.5M to 6.5M JPY
- 3 years of experience to 7 years of experience: 5M to 12.5M JPY
- 7 years to 15 years of experience (Team Lead/EM): 7M to 20M JPY
- 15+ years of experience (EM to Directors/Head of): 10M JPY to 25M JPY
Accordingly to Michael Page Digital team’s data, the below are the average salary that they have gathered for diffrent roles (for IT/SaaS companies)
| Title | Minimum | Average | Maximum |
| Data Scientist | 6M | 8M | 10M |
| Senior Data Scientist | 9M | 11M | 13M |
| Data Warehouse Engineer | 6M | 9M | 11M |
| Engineering Manager | 11M | 14M | 17M |
| IT Director/Head/CTO | 14M | 19.5M | 25M |
| Network Engineer | 5M | 7M | 9M |
| Operations Engineer | 6M | 8.5M | 11M |
| Program Manager | 6M | 8M | 12M |
| Project Manager | 6M | 6M | 11.3M |
| Server Engineer | 5M | 7M | 9M |
| Software Engineer (2-5 years) | 5M | 7.3M | 9.3M |
| Software Engineers (5-10 years) | 6.5M | 9.3M | 12M |
| Senior Software Engineer (10+ years) | 7.5M | 11M | 15M |
| Software Engineer in AI | 8M | 11.3M | 15M |
| Solutions Architect | 7M | 10M | 13M |
| SRE | 7M | 9.5M | 12M |
| QA Engineer | 6M | 7.5M | 9M |
Where to find company specific salary
For a company-specific salary guide, you can refer to Vorkers.com which is a Japanese version of Glassdoor. The website is in Japanese so if you can’t read Japanese, you can use Google translate.
Be careful when using Vorkers as some of the salary will include non-engineer jobs as well, which may lower the overall average salary as non-technical jobs are paid less compared to technical jobs.