India is a growing participant in the Specified Skilled Worker route, and one of the few countries where the JFT-Basic fee is straightforwardly published.
The fee
India’s published JFT-Basic fee has been ₹3,540. Confirm the current figure on Prometric’s India pages before you plan around it — fees are revised, and the figure on a blog post ages.
That fee, though, is usually the smallest part of sitting the exam.
Distance is the real cost
India is very large and test centres are concentrated in major cities. For a great many candidates, the journey to the centre costs considerably more than the exam itself once travel and a night’s accommodation are counted.
Two pieces of practical advice that follow:
Check the full centre address before confirming, and work out travel time at the hour your test actually starts. A centre named after a city is not necessarily in the part of it you assumed.
Travel the night before if you are coming more than about three hours. A delayed train should not be able to cost you the fee, and a night’s accommodation is far cheaper than a retake.
Finding your centre
Use Prometric’s India pages for Specified Skilled Worker tests rather than the global Prometric homepage, which routes into an unrelated test catalogue.
The venue list appears inside the booking flow. You have to start a reservation to see the centres, which is the source of most “I cannot find any centre information” confusion. You can back out before paying.
Which field
Indian candidates enter across the SSW fields. Before committing to one, check two things:
Is it open? Fields have intake caps and caps close — food service has been suspended to new applications since April 2026. See the SSW fields.
When does its skills test run, and where? This is usually what sets your timeline, not your studying. Some fields test rarely, and not necessarily in India. See the skills test explained.
A note on the language route
JFT-Basic is not the only way to meet the SSW language requirement — JLPT N4 also works, and the JLPT is well established in India.
But the JLPT runs twice a year and JFT-Basic runs roughly monthly, and results take two months rather than five business days. For anybody on a timeline, that difference usually decides it. See JFT-Basic or JLPT.
Centres, fees, dates and payment methods are set locally and change. Your own country’s Prometric pages and the Japan Foundation are the sources that bind. Use them for anything you are about to pay for.
What does not change
Wherever you sit it, the exam is identical: four sections, about fifty questions, sixty minutes, scored 10 to 250, and 200 is the pass. The sections are not separately timed, and there is no per-section minimum — only the total counts.
That means every guide on this site applies to you regardless of where you are. Start with what 200 points actually means.
Before you pay for anything
Find out where you stand. Our free practice test covers all four sections, reports by section, takes about fifteen minutes, and works on an inexpensive phone. It costs nothing, which is more than can be said for discovering the answer at the test centre.
Two full-length, timed tests in the same week, both at 200 or above. Then book.