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The purchase taxes are charged on an assessed value, not on the price

Japanese purchase taxes look punishing on paper and are mild in practice, because the base is not what you paid. Real estate acquisition tax is 3% of assessed value for residential land and buildings, a reduced rate that runs to 31 March 2027 against a statutory 4%, and registration licence tax adds 1.5% on the land and 2.0% on a resale building. But the assessed value used for both is typically 50% to 70% of the market price, so the effective cost of a purchase works out at roughly 2% of what you actually hand over, and that is how it is expressed here.

The larger buying cost is the agent's commission. In Japan it is charged to the buyer at 3% of the price plus 60,000 yen, and with judicial scrivener and stamp fees on top the non-tax costs come to about 4% of the price: double the tax.

Fixed asset tax is 1.4% of assessed value each year plus a city planning tax of up to 0.3%, and again the assessed value sits well below the price, so about 1.0% of price is realistic.

Group credit life insurance, built into the rate

Japanese mortgages have no mortgage insurance of the PMI or CMHC kind. Lenders require dan-shin, group credit life insurance, which repays the loan if the borrower dies or becomes severely disabled, and most banks build the premium into the quoted interest rate rather than billing it separately. That is one reason a Japanese rate can look higher than the funding cost alone would suggest, and why there is no separate insurance field on this page.

The yen has no minor unit, so the schedule here rounds interest to whole yen each month rather than to hundredths. That makes the footed total and the closed-form total diverge by a little more than they would in a two-decimal currency; both figures are shown under the table.

For how the calculation works, the formula behind it and what it leaves out, see the full guide.

Data sources

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Each country has its own rates, thresholds and rules, and its own page with the official sources they came from.

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