Moving Within Japan: The 14-Day Rule and What to Do in Order

Most guidance about moving house in Japan is written for Japanese readers, and it is not wrong, it is just incomplete for you. It covers the residence register, the utilities and the removal company. It does not cover the one part of the process that carries a criminal penalty and, further down the line, a risk to your status of residence, because for a Japanese national that part does not exist.

This article is the map. It sets out the deadlines that actually bind you, the article numbers they come from, and the order to do things in so that you are not sent home from a counter and asked to come back. Four companion articles go deeper into the individual steps, and they are linked where they belong in the sequence.

One framing point before anything else. Nothing here depends on which status of residence you hold, beyond the basic fact that the residence register and the zairyu card system apply to mid-to-long-term residents. A student, an engineer, a spouse of a Japanese national and a permanent resident all face the same 14 days and the same counter.

The deadline that is only yours: 14 days

Under Article 19-9, paragraph 1 of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, a person who has moved to a new place of residence must, within 14 days of the day of moving in, report the new place of residence to the Minister of Justice by way of the mayor of the municipality, submitting the zairyu card.

Read that sentence slowly, because three separate facts are packed into it.

The clock starts on the day you move in, not the day you sign the lease and not the day you hand back the old keys. If you sign a contract in March and actually move in on 1 April, the 14 days run from 1 April.

The counter is the municipal office for your new address. Not the old one, not an immigration office. The phrase in the law is that the report is made by way of the mayor, which is why the municipal counter can accept something that is ultimately a report to the immigration authorities.

The card is part of the procedure, not an optional piece of identification. The law says the card is submitted. In practice this is where people come unstuck, and it is the subject of a whole separate article on changing the address on your zairyu card.

What happens if you miss it

There are three distinct consequences, and they are frequently blurred together into a single vague warning. They are not the same and they do not have the same triggers.

The Immigration Services Agency's own phrasing for the first row is that you may be punished by a fine of not more than 200,000 yen. That is the wording you will see on the official procedure pages, without an article number. The provision behind it is Article 71-5, item 2. It is worth being precise about the item number, because item 3 of the same article covers a different failure, namely the reporting obligations for changes to card entries other than the address.

The second row is the one most often mis-stated. A false report is not punished by imprisonment alone. The provision reads as imprisonment for not more than one year or a fine of not more than 200,000 yen, under Article 71-2, item 1. If you see a source that mentions only the prison term, treat that source with suspicion generally, not just on this point.

The two 90-day rules, and why they are not the same rule

This is the single most useful thing in this article, because the confusion is everywhere and the consequences are wildly different.

The immigration 90 days

Article 22-4, paragraph 1, item 9 makes it a ground for revoking a status of residence where a person has left the place of residence they reported and has not reported a new place of residence within 90 days of leaving. It is a ground for revocation, which means a procedure with hearings, not an automatic switch. But it is the serious one.

Note the trigger: leaving the old address. Not moving into the new one. If you leave a flat, stay with friends for three months while you look for something, and only then register, the clock has already been running.

The Immigration Services Agency's published questions and answers discuss a 90-day rule in the context of a newly landed resident who has not yet reported an address at all, which is item 8. The 90 days that applies when you move house is item 9, and it is stated in the statute rather than in the agency's plain-language material.

The My Number card 90 days

Separately, and for an entirely different reason, municipal offices state that a My Number card stops being usable and becomes invalid if more than 90 days pass after the moving-in procedure without the card's continued-use step being completed. This is published on municipal websites. It is a card administration rule. It has no connection to your status of residence, and losing the use of a card is not losing the right to be in Japan.

The order to do things in

Almost every wasted trip to a counter comes from doing these in the wrong sequence.

Before you move

1. Submit the tenshutsu todoke (moving-out notification), if you are leaving the municipality. The Basic Resident Registration Act says this is done in advance. It does not say how many days in advance, which is why the answer differs from one city to the next. If you are moving inside the same municipality, there is no moving-out notification at all, and you instead file a tenkyo todoke after the move. The details, including what the law does and does not fix, are in the article on the moving-out and moving-in notifications.

2. Book the removal. Not a legal step, but a scheduling one, and the reason it belongs here is that March is the month when this goes wrong. The transport ministry states that requests concentrate in March and April, and that the number of moves in March is about twice a normal month. If you can move outside that window, everything else in this list gets easier too. If you cannot, book early and read how to choose a removal company first, because the cancellation terms are the part that catches people.

3. Arrange the stop dates for your utilities and the mail redirection. Electricity, gas, water and post all have their own lead times, and the gas one is the awkward one because it needs a person at the property.

After you move in

4. Submit the tennyu todoke (moving-in notification) at the new municipal office, within 14 days, and take your zairyu card with you. This one visit does two things at once: it registers you on the resident register at the new address, and, because you submitted the card, it counts as the report required by the immigration law. This is the deemed-report mechanism, and it is why you do not have to go to an immigration bureau. Leave the card at home and only the first half happens.

5. Deal with the My Number card at the same counter, in the same visit. The card needs its entries updated and its continued use processed. Do it now and the 90-day card rule never becomes your problem.

6. National health insurance. If you are enrolled in national health insurance, this is a municipal scheme, so a move across a municipal boundary means leaving the old one and joining the new one. The health ministry gives 14 days for these procedures. The specific documents differ between municipalities.

7. Utilities at the new place. Electricity, water, gas and internet. Gas is the one that needs you, or someone acting for you, physically present. The full sequence is in the utilities article.

8. Bank, mobile phone, employer, and anything that posts you something. These are contractual rather than statutory, but the consequences of ignoring them are real, and they are the last thing people do.

The deadlines, in one table

Two entries in that table deserve a comment because they are where inaccurate guidance clusters.

The tenshutsu todoke has no statutory number of days. The Act says it is done in advance and stops there. Every specific window you will read, whether it is two weeks before or thirty days before, is that particular municipality's operating rule, and one municipality can have different windows for its counter and for its online channel. Do not carry a number from one city to another.

The national pension entry says generally no report is needed, and it deliberately gives no deadline. For a category 1 insured person whose My Number is linked to their basic pension number, the pension service states that an address change report is in principle unnecessary, including across municipal boundaries. Where the link does not exist, a report is made to the municipal office. The pension service does not publish a number of days for it, and the 14 days from health insurance does not transfer across.

What to have in your bag when you go to the counter

The exact document list is set by each municipality, so treat this as the core rather than the complete list.

• Your zairyu card. This is the one that changes the legal effect of the visit, not just the speed of it.
• The zairyu cards of every family member who is moving with you and is being registered.
• Your My Number card, and its personal identification numbers, if you hold one.
• The tenshutsu shomeisho (moving-out certificate) from your previous municipality, if one was issued to you.
• Your national health insurance card, if you are enrolled.

The moving-out certificate has an exception worth knowing: where the moving-out notification was made using a My Number card, no certificate is issued and none is needed for the moving-in notification. If you did it that way and nobody handed you a piece of paper, nothing has gone wrong.

What the municipal counter cannot do for you

The municipal office handles your address. It does not handle the rest of your immigration paperwork. A change to your name, your nationality, your date of birth or your period of stay is not a municipal matter, and it is not covered by the 14-day address report. Those go to a regional immigration bureau.

This distinction is the single most common error in English-language articles about moving in Japan, usually in the form of a sentence telling readers to notify immigration of their new address. You do not. You notify the municipality, with the card in your hand, and the law does the rest. But if your name changed at the same time as your address, you have two separate errands at two separate places.

If this is your first move since arriving in Japan

Then some of the steps above will be new rather than repeats, and a few things that are not on this list, such as enrolling in insurance for the first time or setting up a pension record, land at the same time. Our first months in Japan checklist covers that wider ground. Come back to this article for the parts that are specific to changing address rather than arriving. And if the move is inside Tokyo, the Tokyo-specific guide covers the ward-by-ward differences and the bulky waste timetable, neither of which appears in national guidance.

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