- Furusato nozei is built around address and tax liability, not around nationality. We could not find a provision that makes nationality a condition, and the tax the scheme runs on is levied without reference to it: Echizen City states that residence tax is charged, regardless of nationality, on individuals who have an address in that municipality as of January 1.
- The condition that does decide the matter is the one Nara City publishes. The scheme is for a person who has an obligation to pay income tax or the income-levy portion of individual residence tax. If you owe neither, there is nothing for a deduction to come out of.
- Everything runs one year out of step. Residence tax is calculated on the previous calendar year's income, and a donation made this year is deducted from the following fiscal year's residence tax. That lag is what decides whether the scheme is worth anything to you personally.
- 2,000 yen of what you give is yours to absorb. Above that threshold the tax-return route gives an income tax deduction, a residence tax basic portion of 10 per cent, and a residence tax special portion that is capped at 20 per cent of your income levy.
- Some residents should not do this at all. If your residence tax is non-taxable, or your time in Japan ends before the deduction lands, the money goes out and nothing comes back. Work out which side of that line you are on before you spend anything.
- The portals are Japanese-language products. Furunavi runs in Japanese only, with no language switch, so the sequence that works is to understand the scheme in your own language first and open the site second.
Every autumn the same question turns up in foreign-resident groups in Japan, phrased in roughly the same way: am I allowed to do furusato nozei? It is a reasonable question, because the answer is genuinely hard to find. Search in English and you get either a promotional page or a translated summary written for Japanese readers, and neither of them addresses the thing you are actually worried about, which is whether the scheme was designed with you in mind and what happens to your money if it was not.
This article answers that from the primary sources: the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the National Tax Agency, and the tax pages that individual municipalities publish for their own residents. It also does something the promotional pages will not do, which is to tell you when the correct decision is to skip the whole thing. There is a group of foreign residents for whom furusato nozei is a straightforward and worthwhile use of tax they are going to pay anyway, and another group for whom it is a donation with no tax effect at all. The difference between the two is not nationality. It is timing.
What furusato nozei actually is
Strip away the marketing and the mechanism is simple. You make a donation to a municipality of your choosing anywhere in Japan. You keep the paperwork. Then, through one of two procedures, the amount you gave above a 2,000 yen threshold is subtracted from tax you would otherwise have paid, partly from income tax and partly from residence tax. Municipalities compete for these donations by sending thank-you items, which is why the portals look like shopping sites, and that appearance is the single biggest reason people misunderstand what they are signing up for.
It is not a shopping site. It is a tax procedure with a catalogue attached. The catalogue is what gets your attention, but the tax procedure is what determines whether the transaction costs you 2,000 yen or costs you the entire amount.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications sets out the deduction for the tax-return route in three parts: a deduction from income tax, a basic portion of the residence tax deduction at 10 per cent, and a special portion on top. The applicable threshold amount is 2,000 yen, and the special portion is limited to 20 per cent of your residence tax income levy. That 20 per cent cap is where the widely quoted idea of an upper limit comes from. Go past it and the excess is simply a donation, with no further tax effect.
Is there a nationality requirement?
Here is the honest position, stated plainly, because you deserve the reasoning rather than a reassuring sentence.
We could not find a page from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, or from any municipality, that says in so many words that foreign nationals may use furusato nozei. If you have been looking for that page and failing to find it, you were not searching badly. As far as we can establish, it does not exist.
What we also could not find is a provision anywhere that makes nationality a requirement for the scheme. The conditions the official pages set out are about something else entirely.
What the official pages do say
They talk about address and about tax liability, and on both counts they are explicit that nationality is not the test.
Echizen City states that residence tax is levied, regardless of nationality, on an individual who has an address in the municipality as of January 1. Hiroshima City puts the same thing in a page written for foreign residents: a foreign resident who, as of January 1 of that year, is living in Hiroshima and whose income for the previous year exceeded 450,000 yen is, in principle, subject to the tax. Behind that sits the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications position that mid-to-long-term residents and special permanent residents are covered by the Basic Resident Registration Act, which is the law that puts you on the resident register in the first place.
So the chain runs like this. You are registered as a resident because the Basic Resident Registration Act applies to you. Being registered and resident on January 1 makes you liable for that municipality's residence tax, regardless of nationality, in the municipality's own words. Furusato nozei is a mechanism attached to that tax liability, and its published conditions are about the liability rather than about who holds it.
Do not repeat this back to anyone as "the ministry says foreign residents are eligible". It does not say that. What it says is that the residence tax the scheme operates on is levied without regard to nationality, and what the scheme's own conditions describe is a tax liability. The distinction matters if you ever end up asking a municipal office a question, because the office will answer about your tax position and not about your passport.
The condition that actually decides it
Nara City states the target of the scheme in one line: a person who has an obligation to pay income tax or the income-levy portion of individual residence tax. The city also states the consequence, which is that a person whose residence tax is non-taxable does not receive the deduction.
Read that sentence carefully, because it contains an "or" that most summaries flatten into an "and". There are two possible receptacles for the deduction, income tax and the residence tax income levy, and they do not have to both be present. This matters enormously for foreign residents, whose two liabilities very often start and stop at different times.
Income tax on your salary starts in the year you start earning. Residence tax does not. Residence tax for a given fiscal year is charged by the municipality where you had an address on January 1 of that year, on the basis of your income during the previous calendar year, January to December. Echizen City states the previous-year income basis; Kobe City and Tondabayashi City state the January 1 address rule. Combine them and you get the position that surprises almost everyone in their first year: you are paying income tax out of every payslip and no residence tax at all, because on the January 1 in question you were not living in Japan.
The one-year lag, and why it decides everything
Now add the second half of the timing problem. Nara City and Nishitokyo City both state that the deduction is applied to the individual residence tax income levy for the fiscal year following the year of the donation.
So a donation you make in December is not deducted from the residence tax you are paying in December. It is deducted from the residence tax bill that starts the following June. There is a gap of six months to a year and a half between the money leaving your account and the tax reduction appearing, and during that gap your circumstances have to stay in a shape that allows the reduction to happen.
For a Japanese resident who is not going anywhere, this lag is invisible. It is an accounting detail. For a foreign resident on a three-year assignment, or a student about to graduate, or anyone whose visa renewal is not a formality, it is the entire question. You are pre-paying against a tax bill that has not been issued yet, in a country you may not be in when it is.
The lag also runs the other way, in your favour, and it is worth knowing. If you have an address in Japan on January 1, the residence tax for that fiscal year is charged to you even if you leave in March. The obligation attaches on the January 1 date. That has consequences in both directions, and the full treatment of what happens when you leave is in the article on furusato nozei and leaving Japan, which is the single most important companion piece to this one if your departure date is anywhere on the horizon.
Are you on the side that gains, or the side that does not?
This is the section the portals will never write. Work through it before you look at a single thank-you item.
| Your situation | What the scheme can do for you |
|---|---|
| You have lived and worked in Japan through the whole of last calendar year, you are paying residence tax now, and you expect to be here next year | The normal case. Both receptacles exist, the following fiscal year's residence tax will be issued to you, and the deduction lands as designed. |
| You arrived part-way through this year | You have no residence tax this fiscal year, because you had no address here on January 1, so there is no residence tax bill in front of you now for anything to reduce. You do have income tax on your Japanese salary. A donation made this year would be deducted from next fiscal year's residence tax, which only exists if you have an address in Japan on the coming January 1. |
| Your residence tax is non-taxable | Nara City states plainly that a person who is non-taxable for residence tax does not receive the deduction. There is no income levy to subtract from. The details of what does and does not create a deductible position are in the article on the donation limit. |
| You intend to leave Japan before the end of this calendar year | The worst case, and the one people get wrong most often. If you are gone before January 1 you are not charged residence tax for the following fiscal year at all, which sounds like good news until you notice that this also removes the receptacle for your deduction. |
| You intend to leave part-way through next year | Better than it looks. If you have an address in Japan on January 1, the following fiscal year's residence tax is charged to you regardless of your March departure, so the deduction has something to attach to. What you then need is a tax manager and the right claiming route, not the default one. |
Notice what is doing the work in every row of that table. It is the calendar, and specifically January 1. Nationality appears nowhere.
Two ways to claim it, and why the choice is not neutral
There are exactly two procedures, and for foreign residents the choice between them carries more weight than it does for anyone else.
The first is the one-stop exception. It is available to a person who does not otherwise need to file a tax return, typically a salaried employee, and who donated to no more than five municipalities in the year; Osaka City and Hiroshima City both publish those conditions, and both note that repeat donations to the same municipality count as one municipality. You send a form to each recipient municipality, and it must arrive by January 10 of the year following the donation, a deadline published in Kyoto City's completion example and by Sano City.
The second is the ordinary tax return, where you enter the donations yourself and receive the income tax deduction and both residence tax portions.
Here is the part that gets buried. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications states that under the one-stop exception no deduction is made from income tax, and the equivalent amount is deducted from residence tax instead. The whole benefit is moved onto the residence tax side.
Now put that next to what we established above. For a foreign resident, the residence tax side is precisely the side that is fragile. It is the side that does not exist in your first year, the side that disappears if you leave before January 1, and the side that a change of address can disturb. Choosing the one-stop exception means choosing to place your entire deduction on the least stable of your two liabilities. Sometimes that is fine. Sometimes it is exactly the wrong call, and nobody at the portal is going to point it out. The comparison in full, including the fact that filing a tax return for any reason at all cancels a one-stop application you already sent, is in the article comparing the one-stop exception with the tax return.
Using a portal, and what a portal is not
Almost nobody donates by contacting a municipality directly. In practice you go through a portal, and Furunavi is one of the long-running ones: it is operated by Imobile Co., Ltd., a Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime-listed company under code 6535, based in Shibuya, Tokyo and established on August 17, 2007, and the furusato nozei programme has been running since May 2015.
It is a Japanese-language site
This is the first thing to be clear about. Furunavi is published in Japanese only. The pages declare Japanese as the document language and there is no language switch, no English version, and no translated help centre. Anyone telling you the portal is multilingual is describing a different site or has not checked.
That is not a reason to avoid it, but it does dictate the order you do things in. Understand the scheme first, in a language you read fluently, so that when you are looking at a Japanese form you already know what each field is for and what you are agreeing to. Reading the rules off the screen while a browser translation guesses at tax vocabulary is how people end up filing the wrong procedure.
On the account side, the member terms do not set out a restriction by nationality or by country of residence. They do specify that Japanese law governs and that the Tokyo District Court and Tokyo Summary Court have jurisdiction, which is the ordinary shape for a Japanese consumer service.
Read this first, then open the site
Furunavi runs in Japanese with no language switch, so the sequence that works is to settle your own position first and browse second. If the table above put you in one of the rows where the deduction has somewhere to land, this is where you would go to look at municipalities and thank-you items. If it put you in one of the rows where it does not, close the tab and come back when your circumstances have changed.
How you pay is not a trivial choice
Furunavi lists credit cards including Visa, Mastercard, JCB, American Express and Diners, along with Furunavi Money, Amazon Pay, PayPay, Rakuten Pay, d-barai and bank transfer among the accepted methods, and states that the methods available differ by municipality. That last clause is the one to hold on to: the payment options you see are a property of the municipality you picked, not of the portal, so two donations made on the same day can offer different choices.
Where you have the option, a card or one of the smartphone payment services is the cleaner route. The donation completes inside the portal, in one session, with an electronic record attached to your account and a fixed date on it. Bank transfer, postal transfer and paying at a municipal counter move part of the transaction outside the portal, and reconstructing what happened afterwards is harder, which is not what you want in a procedure whose deadlines are counted in calendar days at the end of December.
Points are no longer part of the calculation
If you have read an older guide that talks up point rewards, that guide is out of date. Furunavi's own notice states that the awarding of Furunavi Coins for donations ended at the end of September 2025, and that donations made on or after October 1, 2025 are not eligible even where a review is posted. Coins already held carry an expiry at the end of the month twelve months after they were awarded.
Do not choose a portal, or decide whether to donate at all, on the basis of point returns. The tax deduction is the mechanism. Everything else is a moving target.
Documents, and who decides which ones count
Both claiming routes require you to prove who you are, and the requirement that trips up foreign residents is identification. A zairyu card is a photo identity document and municipalities do accept it as one: Osaka City and Higashiosaka City both list it among acceptable photo identification. What you should not assume is that this is a nationwide guarantee. The document requirements for a donation are set by the municipality receiving it, so the list that matters is the one on that municipality's own page, and checking it before you post anything costs you five minutes.
There is a second layer, which is My Number verification, and it has its own trap for foreign residents: a My Number Card issued to a mid-to-long-term resident carries a validity period tied to the period of stay, so it can expire alongside a status you have since renewed. The full document picture, including what to do when the portal's own guidance lists only a driving licence and a passport, is in the article on documents and the zairyu card.
The receipt, and a question nobody will answer
Each recipient municipality issues a receipt for the donation, and you need it for the tax-return route. When it arrives is not something the portal can tell you. Furunavi states directly that because the document is issued by the municipality, it cannot answer questions about when it will be delivered. That is an unusually honest thing for a commercial site to publish, and it should shape your planning: if a document has to reach you at an address, do not donate the week before you change that address.
There is a separate document, the certificate for the donation deduction, which Furunavi makes available for download from your account page from January 10 of the year following the donation onwards. It is generated automatically and there is no postal version, and it covers only donations made while you were logged in. Donating as a guest, or across two different accounts, leaves you assembling paper receipts by hand.
The limit is a guideline, not a number
You will see a table of suggested maximum donation amounts by annual income and family composition, and it is genuine: the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications does publish one. Kobe City's FAQ, Mito City, Hashima City and Shizuoka City all reproduce or refer to it, and all of them call it what it is, which is a guideline.
It is a guideline because your actual ceiling depends on your own income levy, which depends on your income, your deductions, your dependants and your insurance, and none of those are known with certainty until the year has closed. Anyone quoting you a precise figure for your personal limit before the end of the year is quoting an estimate, whatever confidence they put behind it. Treat the table as a way of understanding the shape of the thing and leave yourself room underneath it.
A sensible order of operations
Putting the whole thing together, the sequence that avoids the common failures is this.
First, establish whether you have a deductible position at all this year. That means knowing whether you are liable for residence tax now, whether you will be liable next fiscal year, and whether you are actually going to be in Japan for the second of those. This is a five-minute question and it is the only one that can make the entire exercise pointless.
Second, decide the claiming route before you donate, not after. The one-stop exception has a hard January 10 deadline and a five-municipality ceiling, and it moves your whole deduction onto residence tax. The tax return has neither limit and keeps the income tax portion in play. Choosing after you have donated to seven municipalities is choosing badly.
Third, check the identification and My Number requirements on the page of the municipality you have chosen, before you commit.
Fourth, keep everything. Receipts, the certificate from your account page, and a note of which municipality you gave to and when. If you leave Japan later, this pile of paper is what makes the departure procedure possible, and it is much easier to keep it than to rebuild it from overseas.
If you are new here and this is one of several tax and administrative decisions arriving at once, the wider sequence of what has to happen in what order is set out in the checklist for moving to Japan. Furusato nozei is genuinely optional. Almost nothing else on that list is.
FAQ
Can foreign residents use furusato nozei?
There is no official page stating in so many words that they can, and we are not going to invent one. What there is, is an absence of any nationality requirement in the scheme's published conditions, plus municipal statements that the tax it operates on is levied regardless of nationality. Echizen City states that residence tax applies regardless of nationality to a person with an address in the municipality as of January 1, and Hiroshima City publishes the same rule in a page addressed to foreign residents. The conditions Nara City publishes for the scheme itself are about having an obligation to pay income tax or the residence tax income levy, not about who you are.
I arrived in Japan this year. Should I donate?
Probably not yet, and the reason is arithmetic rather than eligibility. You had no address in Japan on January 1 of this year, so you are not paying residence tax this fiscal year. A donation made now would be deducted from next fiscal year's residence tax, which is only issued to you if you have an address here on the coming January 1. If you are certain you will be, the position is different from someone who is not, but the safe default in a first partial year is to wait until you have a residence tax bill in your hand and can see what you are working with.
What is the 2,000 yen everyone mentions?
It is the applicable threshold. The deduction is calculated on the amount of the donation above 2,000 yen, so 2,000 yen of it is not returned to you in any form. Above that, the tax-return route gives an income tax deduction, a residence tax basic portion of 10 per cent, and a residence tax special portion limited to 20 per cent of your residence tax income levy. The 20 per cent cap on the special portion is the reason there is an effective ceiling on how much it makes sense to give.
How much can I donate?
Nobody can tell you an exact figure in advance, including the ministry. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications publishes a table by annual income and family composition, and municipalities including Kobe, Mito, Hashima and Shizuoka reproduce it, but all of them describe it as a guideline. Your real ceiling depends on your own income levy for the year, which is not settled until the year has closed. Use the table for the shape of the answer and stay comfortably under it.
Can I use my zairyu card as identification?
Osaka City and Higashiosaka City both list the zairyu card among acceptable photo identity documents, so the answer is yes in those places and it is not an unusual position. But the identification requirements for a donation are set by the municipality receiving that donation, so the only list that governs your case is the one on that municipality's own page. Check it before you send anything, particularly if you are relying on a My Number Card, whose validity for a mid-to-long-term resident is tied to the period of stay and can lapse when the status is renewed.
When will my receipt arrive?
Unknown, and Furunavi says so itself. Its position is that the document is issued by the municipality and it therefore cannot answer questions about delivery timing. There is a separate certificate for the donation deduction which you can download from your account page from January 10 of the following year, generated automatically with no postal version, but it only covers donations you made while logged in. Plan your paperwork around the fact that the paper part has no promised date.
Is Furunavi available in English?
No. The site is published in Japanese only, with no language switch and no translated help pages. Its member terms do not impose a restriction by nationality or country of residence, and they specify Japanese law and the Tokyo courts, which is standard. The practical approach is to learn the scheme first in a language you read properly, then use the site knowing what each step is doing.
Do I still get points or coins for donating?
Not from donations. Furunavi states that the awarding of Furunavi Coins for donations ended at the end of September 2025, and that donations made from October 1, 2025 onwards are outside the scheme even when a review is posted. Coins you already hold expire at the end of the month twelve months after they were granted. Point returns are not a sound basis for deciding whether or where to donate.
I am leaving Japan next year. Does that change anything?
Substantially, and in ways that can reverse the answer. Residence tax attaches to the municipality where you had an address on January 1, so a departure before that date and a departure after it produce opposite results, and the one-stop exception is assessed against your address on January 1 of the year after the donation. There is also a tax manager to appoint, with different filing destinations for residence tax and income tax. Read the departure article before you donate anything at all.
If the timing works, this is the part where you choose
The tax side is settled by your address and your liability, and you can work both of those out from the sections above. What is left is picking municipalities, staying under five of them if you intend to use the one-stop exception, and paying by card or a smartphone payment method so the record sits in one place. The site is in Japanese, so keep this page open next to it.
