Specified Skilled Worker Construction: JAC Levy JPY 12,500/mo

In Specified Skilled Worker (特定技能) construction, the recurring cost that scales with the number of people you take on is the JAC levy (受入負担金): JPY 12,500 per Specified Skilled Worker (i) foreign national (1号特定技能外国人) per month, JPY 150,000 a year, arising every month for as long as the worker stays. It is not necessarily the largest line item, though. A company that joins as a supporting member (賛助会員) instead of coming under a full-member association pays an annual fee of JPY 240,000 regardless of headcount, and while you have only one worker the annual fee is the larger of the two. The items an employer bears fall into three groups: those with a fixed published figure, those that change with the membership route you choose, and those where we have not been able to confirm a single published figure. What an approver asks is not whether the total is large or small, but whether you can draw that distinction and show where each figure comes from.

For the items with a fixed published figure, a subtotal can be written. If work starts on the first of the month and the worker is with you for 12 months (so the levy counts 12 months), the application is a change of status of residence for a person already in Japan, and the skilled-worker registration is the detailed type, then: levy JPY 150,000 (JPY 12,500 × 12 months) + CCUS skilled-worker registration JPY 4,900 (tax included) + change of status of residence JPY 6,000 = JPY 160,900. That is the first-year subtotal per person for those three items. File the change online and the permission is JPY 5,500, making the subtotal JPY 160,400. If work starts part-way through a month the count becomes 13 months, the levy is JPY 162,500 and the subtotal JPY 173,400 (JPY 172,900 if filed online).

The CCUS business registration fee, the construction business licence and the supporting-member annual fee are company-level: list them separately without multiplying by headcount. The administrator ID charge is multiplied by the number of IDs, not by the number of people. The support outsourcing fee, the fee for accreditation of the acceptance plan (建設特定技能受入計画), and the dues a full-member association collects from its member companies are left blank in the draft, because we have not been able to confirm a published figure for what the employer bears. The JPY 360,000 full-member annual fee that JAC publishes is what the association pays JAC, not what the employer pays.

The cost breakdown table to put in the approval request (with sources)

Six columns — item, unit, amount, frequency, notes, source — let one sheet show the figure, the assumption behind it and where the basis sits, all at once. The unit column is there because per person, per company, per ID, and per worker-day per site are all mixed together. Without it, company-level items get inflated by headcount while ID-level items get undercounted. The notes column is for the assumptions that are easy to miss when you look only at the amount. (All sources retrieved 14 August 2026.)

The provisions that make JAC membership and CCUS registration requirements

These two are accreditation requirements specific to the construction sector, and the basis is Article 3(3) of Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Notification No. 357 of 2019 (平成31年国土交通省告示第357号), which sets the standards specific to the construction sector and is abbreviated in the operational guidelines supplement as “the Notification”. The provision divides into sub-items requirement by requirement, and citing one item to cover them all gets the request sent back.

• Item (i)(a): holding a licence under Article 3(1) of the Construction Business Act
• Item (i)(b): being registered in the Construction Career Up System (= CCUS business registration)
• Item (i)(c): belonging to the corporation registered under Article 10 of the same Notification (= JAC) or to a construction industry association that constitutes that corporation, and complying with the code of conduct (= JAC membership)
• Item (v): registering the Specified Skilled Worker (i) foreign national in the Construction Career Up System (= CCUS skilled-worker registration)

Item (i)(b) and item (v) both refer to CCUS registration, and the only difference is whether it is the business side or the worker side. The basis for JAC membership is neither of those but item (i)(c), which stands as a separate requirement in the text. The provisions are set out as [related provisions] under “Part 4: Accreditation of the construction Specified Skilled Worker acceptance plan” in the operational guidelines supplement (Operational Guidelines on the Acceptance of Specified Skilled Worker Foreign Nationals in Specified Sectors — Standards for the Construction Sector), and the items of Article 3(3) above appear there as enacted. The supplement is not a complete text of the Notification but a chapter-by-chapter extract, so in places articles and items are marked “(omitted)”. If you attach the Notification itself to the request, check it against the original text.

The levy: no pro-rating, outside consumption tax, and not chargeable to the worker

The amount itself is on JAC’s “Annual fees and the acceptance levy”; the rules for calculating it and for who bears it are in a separate document, Chapter 2-03 “Costs of acceptance” of the Manual for Accepting Foreign Nationals. The second is the one estimates get wrong: look only at the page carrying the amount and these four points drop out.

• No pro-rating is applied. The month containing the day work started (the date of issue shown on the residence card for “Specified Skilled Worker (i)”) is counted as month one, and the month containing the day the employment contract ends or the worker leaves is counted as the final month
• Consumption tax does not apply to the transaction. The tax category when the cost is booked is “outside the scope of consumption tax”
• In the original: “the Specified Skilled Worker (i) foreign national must not be made to bear it, whether directly or indirectly”
• Specified Skilled Worker (ii) is not subject to the levy

Work can start at the very end of a month and that month is still month one, so the counting alone moves an estimate by one to two months. Write “headcount × months counted × JPY 12,500” in the approval request rather than a single total, and attach the date of issue on the residence card as the basis for when the count starts.

A JPY 0 annual fee means “not to JAC”, not “not to anyone”

Where you come under a construction industry association that is a full member, JAC’s published text reads: “Accepting companies and individuals that belong to a construction industry association that is a full member of JAC do not need to pay an annual fee to JAC, because the association pays the annual fee to JAC. (Please pay the dues set by the construction industry association you belong to, to that association.)” The statement that the annual fee is JPY 0 and the bracketed sentence asking for dues to the association sit in the same paragraph. Under the heading “Annual fee” on the same page there is only “There is no annual fee payable to JAC.”, with no bracketed sentence attached. An annual fee of JPY 0 to JAC and dues of JPY 0 to the association are two different things.

There is no published standard amount for association dues, so no going rate can be written here. The associations available to join are listed in JAC’s list of full and supporting members as “full members (63 construction industry associations)”. Check the dues directly with the association concerned, and write the amount and the date checked into the request. If you do not belong to an association, you join as a supporting member at JPY 240,000 a year, and that one is a published figure. It is a fork you choose yourself, so setting the two routes side by side leaves a record of why you chose as you did.

JAC covers two CCUS charges in full — but not in the same form

JAC publishes that it covers the administrator ID charge and the skill evaluation fee (能力評価手数料) in full, but in accounting terms they are different things.

• The administrator ID charge works as a reimbursement. The original reads: “please pay it once to the Foundation for Promotion of Construction Industry (建設業振興基金, the CCUS secretariat), and JAC will remit the full amount to the accepting company at a later date”. Do not net the payment against the money coming back; write them on two lines
• The skill evaluation fee does not arise as a payment at all. Full coverage by the Foundation for Promotion of Construction Industry has been in effect since 1 August 2025, and has been extended from 1 April 2026 for the time being. JAC’s own text states that “because payment of the fee is no longer necessary, an application to JAC for a skill evaluation fee subsidy can no longer be made either”. Put a reimbursement line in and you are recording both a payment and a refund that do not exist

The business registration fee, the skilled-worker registration fee and the site usage fee are not written as covered. Note also that the end date of the extension is stated as “to be announced separately”, so where a request spans periods, state the date the source was retrieved.

Renewal of the status of residence is not necessarily once a year

The statutory fees are JPY 0 for an application for a certificate of eligibility where the worker is brought in from overseas (the original reads “No fee is charged.”), and JPY 6,000 each for an application to change status from within Japan and an application to renew (JPY 5,500 for an online application, both paid by revenue stamp).

What determines the number of renewals is the period of stay. Appended Table 2 of the Regulation for Enforcement of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act provides, for Specified Skilled Worker (i), “a period designated by the Minister of Justice for each individual foreign national, not exceeding three years“. The ceiling is three years and the actual period is designated individually, so the number of renewals is not settled until you look at the period of stay on the residence card. Fix “JPY 6,000 a year” in the budget and it falls short where a shorter period is designated. In the request, count the renewals from the period of stay written on the residence card, and write a range until it is settled.

The entry in the same Appended Table 2 that provides “not exceeding one year” is Technical Intern Training (i) (技能実習1号), a separate row from Specified Skilled Worker (i).

How to write the two items with no confirmable published figure

For the support outsourcing fee and the fee for accreditation of the acceptance plan, we have not been able to confirm published amounts. What can be written here goes as far as “could not be confirmed” and no further; it cannot be written as “does not exist”. The register of Registered Support Organizations is a list showing whether an organisation is registered, not a system for publishing costs, and the absence of a cost column in that register does not prove the absence of a going rate. For the same reason it cannot be written as “free of charge” either.

For an item with no single published figure, what stands up in an approval process is not a guess at the going rate but a breakdown of the quotation. Decide in advance which items every provider will be asked to quote at the same granularity. Providers can be checked in the Immigration Services Agency’s register of Registered Support Organizations (11,533 entries as at 10 August 2026, published as an Excel file; organisations whose registration was revoked after registering are not listed).

• Initial cost and monthly cost separately, and the total across the period of stay
• Which of the ten mandatory support items are inside the outsourcing scope and which are outside it
• Whether interpreting, travel and housing arrangement costs are billed separately or included in the outsourcing fee
• Which party carries out the periodic interviews and the notifications and reports to the authorities
• The incremental unit price when one more foreign national is added
• How amounts are settled where acceptance ends part-way through the contract term

Set out at this granularity, the gaps between providers’ figures becomes legible as either a difference in scope or a difference in unit price. What you get asked about later is less the amount itself than the axis of comparison and the date it was obtained.

The cost that does not appear as money is the time to accreditation

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism states nationally that it expects “approximately one and a half to two months (excluding any period for corrections)” from the accreditation application for the acceptance plan through to accreditation, and adds that “depending on the region, it may take a further several months” (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, “Application manual, forms and system operating instructions [Specified Skilled Worker system (construction sector)]”, retrieved 14 August 2026). The Kanto Regional Development Bureau publishes that “as we are currently receiving a very large number of applications, even where there are no corrections at all, we expect approximately three to three and a half months from application to accreditation” (Kanto Regional Development Bureau, “Construction Specified Skilled Worker acceptance plans”, retrieved the same day).

That three and a half months is the Kanto Regional Development Bureau’s figure and is not uniform nationwide, and it is the value for the case with no corrections. Corrections extend it further. The schedule does not end at accreditation of the acceptance plan. The Ministry states that the accreditation application for the acceptance plan and the status of residence application to the Immigration Services Agency may be filed in parallel, but that because the certificate of accreditation is an attachment to the application to that Agency, “no permission from the Immigration Services Agency will be issued unless our Ministry’s accreditation has been granted”, and advises filing with the Agency around two to three months before the desired start of work. Write the schedule in the request in two stages: up to accreditation, and the immigration procedure. The schedule works backwards from the desired start date, but the date that gets fixed first is the filing date of the accreditation application. Under the Ministry’s guidance, an application can be made from roughly six months before the employment start date (or, where a worker moves on to Specified Skilled Worker from technical intern training, from six months before the completion date of the technical intern training plan), and from there it is one and a half to two months to accreditation, three to three and a half months at the Kanto Regional Development Bureau, with the immigration procedure still to follow. Check first whether the filing date you get by subtracting from the desired start date leaves room for that.

Who you contract with, and where responsibility sits

Terra Vista holds none of the following: an employment placement business licence (職業紹介事業許可), a worker dispatch business licence (労働者派遣事業許可), or registration as a Registered Support Organization (登録支援機関). Recruitment, introduction, brokerage and dispatch of personnel are therefore outside what we do, and we do not become the party to which a support plan for a Specified Skilled Worker (i) foreign national (1号特定技能外国人支援計画) is outsourced.

The contracts are kept separate. For any step that requires a licence, your company contracts directly with the licensed provider, and that provider carries out the work. The parties to a support outsourcing contract are your company and the Registered Support Organization; we are not a party to it. Responsibility follows the same contract lines. The scope of the contract between us and your company is limited to work that requires no licence.

Within that scope, what we do is set out the cost breakdown with its sources and provide it, check the licence numbers and registration numbers of the providers you have selected against the public registers described below, and design the schedule and organise the tracking of progress. Add a “contracting party” column to the breakdown table in the request: once it is approved, who the order goes to is fixed item by item, and where responsibility sits is recorded at the same time. The registers used for checking are public. Registered Support Organizations appear in the Immigration Services Agency’s register of Registered Support Organizations. On employment placement, the Immigration Services Agency’s operational guidelines list, among the documents to be submitted where there is a party acting as an intermediary, “a printout of the screen of the ‘Comprehensive Human Resources Services Site’ (人材サービス総合サイト) on the website of the Employment Security Bureau of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare”. We are Terra Vista Co., Ltd. (corporate number 1030001171183, incorporated 24 February 2026, Japan), and as stated above we hold none of those licences or registrations.

Tell us the number of people you plan to take on and the timing. In a free 30-minute consultation, we will organise this into a breakdown that separates the published figures from the items we could not confirm, and provide it to you.

Frequently asked questions

In Specified Skilled Worker construction, what costs does the accepting company definitely bear?

The one that arises whichever membership route you take is the JAC levy, at JPY 12,500 per Specified Skilled Worker (i) foreign national per month (JPY 150,000 a year). Beyond that there are the CCUS business registration fee, skilled-worker registration fee and administrator ID charge, and the statutory fees for the status of residence.

Does the JPY 240,000 JAC annual fee apply to every company?

No. Where you come under a construction industry association that is a full member of JAC, the annual fee payable to JAC is published as JPY 0. JPY 240,000 a year is the supporting-member amount, and there are two cases in which you become a supporting member: where the construction industry association you belong to is not a full member of JAC, and where you do not belong to an association at all. Even where you come under a full member, though, the dues set by the association you belong to have to be paid to that association, and there is no standard published amount for them.

What is the going rate for outsourcing to a Registered Support Organization?

We have not been able to confirm a single published figure. The register of Registered Support Organizations is a list showing whether an organisation is registered, not a mechanism for publishing costs, so the absence of a cost column there does not mean the absence of a going rate. Rather than guessing at a rate, obtain the basis for quotations from several providers at the same granularity — outsourcing scope, separately billed items, incremental unit price and settlement on early termination — and keep a record of the axis of comparison and the date obtained.

Does a Specified Skilled Worker (i) status of residence have to be renewed every year?

Not necessarily every year. Appended Table 2 of the Regulation for Enforcement of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act provides that the period of stay for Specified Skilled Worker (i) is “a period designated by the Minister of Justice for each individual foreign national, not exceeding three years”, and the period is designated individually. Count the number of renewals by checking the period of stay written on the residence card.

How long does accreditation of an acceptance plan take?

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism states nationally that it expects “approximately one and a half to two months (excluding any period for corrections)”, adding that “depending on the region, it may take a further several months”. The Kanto Regional Development Bureau publishes that “as we are currently receiving a very large number of applications, even where there are no corrections at all, we expect approximately three to three and a half months from application to accreditation”. The latter is that bureau’s figure and is not uniform nationwide (both retrieved 14 August 2026).