- The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications does publish a table of suggested donation amounts arranged by annual income and family composition. It is real, it is official, and municipalities reproduce it. What it is not is a calculation of your number.
- Hashima City, Shizuoka City and Mito City all describe the published figures as a guideline. That word is doing serious work. A guideline is an illustration built on assumptions; a limit is a figure derived from your own tax position, and only one of those exists before the year has closed.
- The ceiling exists because the residence tax special portion is capped at 20 per cent of your residence tax income levy. Your income levy is therefore the quantity that decides everything, and anything that reduces your income levy reduces your ceiling with it.
- The inputs that move the figure are your income, the number of dependent relatives you have, and your income deductions, which include medical expenses, social insurance premiums, life insurance premiums and earthquake insurance premiums among others. All of them are only final once the calendar year has ended.
- There are two situations where the answer is not a smaller number but zero. Nara City states that a person who is non-taxable for residence tax does not receive the deduction. And in your first year in Japan there is no previous-year income here for residence tax to be calculated on, so no residence tax arises and the deduction has nothing to reduce.
- 2,000 yen is absorbed by you in every case. Anything given above your actual ceiling is a donation with no further tax effect, which is a perfectly respectable thing to do on purpose and an expensive thing to do by accident.
Every furusato nozei portal has a simulator. You enter a salary figure, you say whether you are married and how many children you have, and a number comes back. It is presented cleanly, with no visible uncertainty, and it is very tempting to treat it as an instruction.
It is not an instruction. It is an estimate built on assumptions about a year that has not finished, and for foreign residents in particular the assumptions behind it are the ones most likely to be false. This article explains where the number comes from, what moves it, and the two circumstances in which the correct figure is not a smaller amount but nothing at all.
Whether the scheme suits your situation in the first place is the subject of the main article on furusato nozei for foreign residents. What follows assumes you are past that and are now deciding how much.
What is actually published
Start with the good news, because the table is genuine and worth using.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications publishes a table of suggested furusato nozei donation amounts organised by annual income and by family composition. Municipalities reproduce it or point to it. Kobe City's FAQ refers to it. Mito City, Hashima City and Shizuoka City all present it to their residents.
And every one of them attaches the same qualification. The figures are a guideline. They are not a determination of the amount any particular person may give and still receive the full deduction.
We are not reproducing any of the figures here, and the reason is not caution for its own sake. A number lifted out of a table and dropped into an English article loses the assumptions that made it meaningful, and what survives the journey is a number that looks like a promise. The table is worth looking at in its published context, where the qualification travels with it.
Where the ceiling comes from at all
The ceiling is not a rule someone wrote down. It emerges from the arithmetic of the deduction, and understanding that is what turns the table from a mystery into a tool.
Take the return route apart and you find three pieces: something lifted off income tax, a basic residence tax portion set at 10 per cent, and a special residence tax portion. The applicable threshold amount is 2,000 yen. Only the special portion carries a ceiling, and that ceiling sits at 20 per cent of your residence tax income levy.
That cap is the entire mechanism. Below the point at which it binds, the three parts between them account for the donation above the threshold. Once the special portion hits its cap, the additional amounts you give stop producing additional deduction, and what you give beyond that point is simply a gift.
So the sentence people are really asking about is this one: how much can I give before the special portion reaches 20 per cent of my income levy? And that question cannot be answered without knowing your income levy, which is the sticking point.
Notice what the ceiling is anchored to. Not your salary. Your residence tax income levy, which is what remains after your deductions have been applied to your income. Two people with identical salaries can have materially different income levies, and therefore different ceilings, because their deductions differ. Any estimate keyed only to gross annual income is assuming its way past the variable that matters.
The things that move your figure
Income
The obvious input, and the one every simulator asks for. It is also less stable than the form implies. A bonus that lands differently from last year, a change of employer, unpaid leave, a period of overtime, or income from more than one source all move the figure, and none of them are settled until the year is over. If you enter last year's salary because it is the number you happen to know, you are estimating this year's ceiling from a year that has already been superseded.
Dependent relatives
The number of dependent relatives is the second input the published table is organised around, alongside income. It is the reason the table is a grid rather than a list. A change in your household during the year changes which row of the grid you belong to, and family circumstances for foreign residents change more often than the table's typical reader might assume.
Your income deductions, and the twist in them
This is the part that is left out of casual explanations. Your ceiling is built on your income levy, and your income levy is what is left after your income deductions are applied. Those deductions include medical expenses, social insurance premiums, life insurance premiums and earthquake insurance premiums, among others.
Every one of those reduces your income levy. Reducing your income levy reduces 20 per cent of your income levy. So each of them lowers your furusato nozei ceiling.
This produces a result that feels wrong the first time you meet it: a year in which you had substantial medical costs is a year in which your furusato nozei ceiling is lower than you would have guessed. The medical expenses are good for your tax position overall. They are not good for the amount you can usefully donate, and the simulator you used in November did not know about them.
A medical expense deduction carries a second consequence in this scheme, and the two together catch people. Claiming it means filing a tax return, and filing a tax return switches off a one-stop exception application you have already sent. So the same event lowers your ceiling and changes your claiming route. If you are going to claim medical expenses, know it before you decide how much to donate and how to claim it. The route comparison is in the article on the one-stop exception and the tax return.
The first case where the answer is zero: no residence tax to reduce
Nara City describes who the scheme is aimed at, namely someone carrying an obligation to pay either income tax or the individual residence tax income levy, and then states the corollary without hedging: where residence tax is non-taxable, the deduction is not received.
There is nothing subtle happening here. The residence tax portions of the deduction operate by reducing a residence tax income levy. If no income levy is being charged to you, there is nothing for them to reduce, and they do not convert themselves into cash or into anything else. The money leaves your account and the tax effect on that side is nil.
This is not a rare situation. Residents on modest incomes, residents who worked for part of a year only, and residents whose circumstances put them outside the charge can all find themselves here. The correct answer for them is not a small donation. It is that the tax mechanism is not available, and any giving they do should be understood as giving.
The second case where the answer is zero: your first year in Japan
This one is specific to the readers of this site, and it is not covered by any simulator, because the simulator was not written with you in mind.
Residence tax for a fiscal year rests on two things: your income across the preceding calendar year, January through December, and the municipality in which you held an address on that year's January 1, which is the body that levies it. Both halves of that are published by municipalities: Echizen City states the previous-year basis, and Kobe City and Tondabayashi City state the January 1 address rule.
Now apply it to someone who arrived in Japan in April. On January 1 of that year they had no address in Japan, and during the previous calendar year they had no income here. Both conditions fail. No residence tax arises for that fiscal year, and there is no income levy, and therefore no ceiling in the sense the table describes.
What this person does have is income tax, deducted from every payslip. So a donation is not entirely without effect on the return route, where an income tax deduction exists. But the residence tax portions, which are the larger part of the mechanism, have nothing to attach to in that fiscal year.
The other half of the timing question is what happens the following year. A donation made now is deducted from the following fiscal year's residence tax, which will only be charged to you if you have an address in Japan on the coming January 1. For someone who arrived in April and is staying, that condition will be met and the position improves considerably. For someone who arrived in April and may not stay, it is exactly the uncertainty that the article on furusato nozei and leaving Japan is about.
Work out your position, then give an amount you are comfortable with
If you have a full previous calendar year of income in Japan and a residence tax bill in front of you, the guideline table is a reasonable starting point and leaving headroom under it costs you very little. Furunavi is published in Japanese with no language switch, so it is worth arriving with your amount already decided rather than being talked into one by a catalogue.
Why the guideline fits foreign residents less well than it fits its intended reader
The table is not badly made. It is made for a particular reader: someone in continuous employment, resident throughout the previous calendar year, whose household composition is stable and whose deductions are ordinary. For that reader the estimate is close, and the gap between the guideline and reality is small enough to absorb.
Read down the list of assumptions and count how many of them are safe for a foreign resident. Continuous residence across the previous calendar year fails for anyone who arrived mid-year. Stable household composition is uncertain for anyone whose family situation is affected by their own status. Ordinary deductions are uncertain for anyone with a year containing significant medical costs or an unusual insurance position. And continuous employment is exactly what a fixed-term assignment is not.
None of that makes the table useless. It makes it what it says it is, a guideline, and it means the margin you should leave under it is wider than the margin a long-term resident needs.
Using a guideline without getting hurt by it
A few habits make the imprecision harmless.
Leave headroom. The cost of donating below your true ceiling is that you did not use all of the available benefit. The cost of donating above it is that the excess produces nothing. Those are not symmetrical, and the sensible response to an uncertain figure is to stay under it.
Estimate late rather than early. The later in the year you calculate, the more of your income and your deductions are known. An estimate made in November has far less to guess at than one made in March.
Treat 2,000 yen as a fixed cost of participating. It is the applicable threshold amount and it is not returned to you under either claiming route. Spreading a small total across many municipalities does not change that figure, but it does change your document workload and can put you past the five-municipality ceiling for the one-stop exception.
And decide what you are doing. If you want to support a particular municipality beyond the point where the tax mechanism helps, that is a legitimate choice and nothing here argues against it. What is worth avoiding is doing it accidentally, in the belief that a deduction is following behind.
The practical steps that surround the amount
Deciding how much is one decision among several, and the others have deadlines attached.
The documents come first in practice, because they can stop the process regardless of the amount. The requirements are set by the municipality receiving the donation, so the page that governs your case is that municipality's own, and what counts as acceptable identification for a foreign resident is set out in the article on documents and the zairyu card. A large donation to a municipality whose requirements you cannot meet is worse than a small one to a municipality whose requirements you can.
How you pay is worth a moment as well. Furunavi accepts credit cards along with Furunavi Money, Amazon Pay, PayPay, Rakuten Pay and d-barai among its methods, and states that the methods available differ by municipality. A card or a smartphone payment service completes the donation inside the portal with a dated record on your account, which is the record the consolidated certificate is later built from; bank transfer, postal transfer, cash by registered mail and payment at a counter move part of the transaction outside that record.
The receipt from each municipality then arrives on a schedule nobody will commit to. Furunavi's position is that the receipt is a municipal document, so it cannot answer questions about when delivery will happen. Separately, the certificate for the donation deduction can be pulled from your account page once January 10 of the year after the donation has passed; no paper version is issued, and it reaches only the donations you placed while signed in.
What should not enter the calculation at all is point rewards. Furunavi has stated that Furunavi Coin awards for donations stopped at the end of September 2025, that a donation dated October 1, 2025 or later sits outside the scheme even when a review is posted, and that coins already granted expire at the end of the month twelve months after the award. There is no return there to optimise against, and there never was one large enough to justify donating past your ceiling.
If furusato nozei is one item in a longer list of things to sort out after arriving, the order the rest of them go in is set out in the checklist for moving to Japan. This is one of the few genuinely optional entries on that list, and in a first partial year it is often the right one to postpone.
FAQ
How much can I donate?
Nobody can give you an exact figure in advance, and that includes the ministry. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications publishes a table by annual income and family composition, and municipalities including Hashima, Shizuoka and Mito reproduce it while describing it as a guideline. Your actual ceiling depends on your residence tax income levy, which is not settled until the calendar year has closed. Read the table for the shape of the answer, then set your own figure some way below it.
Why does the ceiling depend on my income levy rather than my salary?
Because of how the deduction is built. The residence tax special portion is capped at 20 per cent of your residence tax income levy, and that cap is what creates the ceiling. Your income levy is your income after your deductions have been applied, so two people on the same salary with different deductions have different ceilings. An estimate based on gross salary alone is assuming a standard deduction position.
Do medical expenses really lower my limit?
They reduce your income levy, and the ceiling is a percentage of your income levy, so yes, the effect runs that way. The same is true of social insurance premiums, life insurance premiums and earthquake insurance premiums. There is a second consequence too: claiming a medical expense deduction means filing a tax return, and filing a return switches off a one-stop exception application you have already sent. Both effects point to deciding the amount and the route together.
What happens if I donate more than my ceiling?
The excess produces no further tax effect. It is not penalised and it is not lost in any dramatic sense; it is simply a donation, and the municipality receives it. Whether that is acceptable depends entirely on whether you meant to do it. The reason to leave headroom is that the two errors are not symmetrical: undershooting costs you a little unused benefit, while overshooting costs you the full amount of the excess.
My residence tax is non-taxable. Can I still benefit?
Not through the residence tax side. Nara City states that a person who is non-taxable for residence tax does not receive the deduction, and the reason is structural: those portions of the deduction work by reducing a residence tax income levy, and there is no levy in front of them. If you give in that position, treat it as giving rather than as a tax arrangement.
I arrived in Japan this year. What is my limit?
In terms of the residence tax mechanism, there is not one this fiscal year. The tax is worked out from the preceding calendar year's income and charged by whichever municipality held your address on January 1, and in a first year neither of those lands, so no income levy exists to take a percentage of. You are paying income tax, so the return route can still produce an income tax deduction, but the larger part of the mechanism has nothing to attach to. A donation made now would work against the following fiscal year's residence tax, which requires you to have an address in Japan on the coming January 1.
Are the portal simulators wrong?
They are estimates, and they are reasonable ones for the reader they were designed for: someone in continuous employment through the previous calendar year with an ordinary deduction position. They are less reliable when any of those assumptions fails, which for foreign residents happens often. Treat a simulator result as an upper indication rather than an allowance, and remember that it does not know about the deductions you have not entered.
Does the 2,000 yen come off my limit?
Think of it as a fixed cost of taking part rather than as part of the ceiling. It is the applicable threshold amount, the deduction is calculated on what you give above it, and it is not returned to you under either claiming route. Splitting your donations across several municipalities does not multiply it, but it does multiply your paperwork and can take you past the five-municipality ceiling that the one-stop exception depends on.
When in the year should I calculate?
As late as is practical, because the further into the year you are, the fewer variables remain. By November most of your income and most of your deductions are visible. What pushes against leaving it later still is the paperwork: under the one-stop exception the application has to reach each recipient municipality by January 10 of the year following the donation, and a late-December donation leaves very little time for that across the New Year period.
Can I check any of this in English on the portal?
No. Furunavi is published in Japanese only, with no language switch and no translated help pages, so its simulator and its explanatory material are in Japanese as well. That is a further reason to settle the amount before you open it. If you understand that the ceiling is a percentage of your income levy and that every deduction reduces it, you already know more than a simulator can tell you from a salary figure.
Pick the amount first, then pick where it goes
A figure you have chosen with headroom under the guideline, and which you would be content with even if part of it turned out to be pure donation, is a figure that cannot go wrong on you. With that settled, the enjoyable part is choosing municipalities, and paying by card or a smartphone payment method keeps the record in one place for January.
