Nobody can give you one number — costs vary by country, field and agency. But the shape of the spending is consistent, and knowing it protects you from the version that goes wrong.
Verify before you act on this. The Specified Skilled Worker system is revised frequently. The Immigration Services Agency of Japan and the ministry responsible for your field are the sources that bind. This page is orientation, not authority.
The legitimate costs
| Item | Notes |
|---|---|
| Japanese study | Free to several hundred dollars |
| JFT-Basic fee | Set per country, paid to Prometric |
| Travel to the test centre | Often more than the fee itself |
| Skills evaluation test fee | Varies by field and country |
| Travel to the skills test | May be in another city, or country |
| Passport | If you do not have one |
| Medical checks | Sometimes required |
| Document translation and certification | Varies |
| Flight to Japan | One way |
| Initial living costs in Japan | Before your first payday |
| Agency fee | The variable that matters |
The costs people forget
Travel to the tests. Test centres cluster in capitals. For candidates outside them, travel and a night’s accommodation routinely exceed the exam fee. If there is no centre in your country at all, add a flight and possibly a visa. See where you can take JFT-Basic.
Retakes. There is no discount for a second attempt. A retake is the full fee, the full travel, and another two months. This is the most avoidable cost in the entire process — see below.
The gap before your first payday. You arrive, and you are not paid for several weeks. You need to eat, travel to work, and cover whatever is not provided. Budget for at least the first month.
The line that ruins people
The agency fee.
Everything above is bounded and predictable. Agency fees are not, and they are where this process goes wrong for people. Large up-front payments, often financed as loans against future wages, are the mechanism behind the debt problems that have attracted sustained criticism of foreign labour recruitment in Japan for years.
The test is simple: if repaying it would take years, that is not a cost of entry. It is a trap. Debt is what makes a worker unable to leave a bad placement, and being unable to leave is where the serious abuse begins.
Ask for the total, itemised, in writing, including anything repaid from wages, before you pay anything. See agency red flags.
How to spend the least
Do not book a test before you are ready. The single largest avoidable cost. A retake doubles both the fee and the travel, and the failure was predictable for free.
The rule:
Two full-length, timed tests in the same week, both at 200 or above. Then book.
Our free practice test costs nothing, takes about fifteen minutes and reports by section.
Study free first. Kana, a spaced-repetition app, graded listening and official sample questions will take most people a long way. See free JFT-Basic resources. Pay for structure and correction only if that is genuinely what you are missing — see can you pass by self-study.
Check your field is open before investing in its skills test. Food service has been closed to new applications since April 2026. A year of preparation for a suspended field is a real cost that a ten-minute check avoids.
Check your exemptions. If you have completed technical intern training in the same field, you may not need the skills test or the language test at all. See SSW versus technical intern training.
What you get back
Two things worth knowing:
Pension. Foreign workers who leave Japan may claim a lump-sum withdrawal payment for part of their pension contributions. Many never claim it. Check the rules and the time limit.
The qualification. Your language certificate and skills test do not vanish if your first plan changes. They are yours.
And the largest cost is not money
It is time. The process takes six months to a year after you pass, and the parts you control are the language test and how early you start on the skills test and the employer search.
Starting the language today is the cheapest thing on this page and the one that moves the most.