Japan tax-free shopping: the new refund system

For more than a decade, tax-free shopping in Japan meant showing your passport at the till and paying about 9% less on the spot. For anything bought from 1 November 2026, that is over. You pay the full, tax-inclusive price like everyone else, and the tax comes back only once Japan Customs has seen your goods leave.

The change is simple on paper and easy to get wrong in practice, mostly at the airport. Everything here comes from the National Tax Agency, the Japan Tourism Agency, Japan Customs and the amended law itself, checked again on 28 October 2026.

In short: From 1 November 2026 you pay the tax at the till and get it back after customs confirms export.

The legal switch sits in Article 8 of the Consumption Tax Act, rewritten by Act No. 13 of 2025, promulgated on 31 March 2025 and effective on 1 November 2026. The Ministry of Finance's tax reform outline describes the new model in one sentence.

Three things go away entirely: the split between general goods and consumables, the ¥500,000 cap on consumables, and the special sealed packaging. The National Tax Agency's English leaflet lists all three.

In short: Shop, keep the goods, scan your passport before check-in, then get the refund.

Here is the whole route in five steps, as Japan Customs sets it out. The sections below explain each one and where people slip up.

1. 1At the shop: spend ¥5,000 or more before tax in one store on one day, show your passport or a live Visit Japan Web tax-free QR code, and pay the full price, tax included.
2. 2Keep the goods with you and leave Japan within 90 days of purchase. Don't eat, drink or use any food, drinks or cosmetics you want the tax back on.
3. 3At the airport, before you check in any bags, scan your passport at a Tax Refund Kiosk in the international departure lobby, or do it on your phone through Visit Japan Web at the seven big airports.
4. 4Green result: you are done. Red result: take the goods to the customs inspection area nearby.
5. 5Once customs confirms the export, the shop or its refund company pays the tax back by card, bank transfer, app or cash at the airport, depending on the shop, minus any fee it charges.

In short: Goods bought up to 31 October follow the old rules, whenever you fly home.

This is the question most people planning an autumn trip actually have, and the answer is clean. The new system applies to goods handed over from 1 November 2026, whatever day you fly home, and there is no overlap period in which shops can choose.

So a camera bought tax-free on 30 October stays under the old rules, even if you leave in mid-November. You carry it out and show your passport at customs as before. A purchase on 1 November is under the new system from midnight, although a shop whose trading day runs past midnight may book a sale made between 00:00 and 01:00 as 31 October.

The Tax Agency's own example is the one to remember. Goods bought by 31 October and then posted home separately are taxed at customs on the spot, because under the old system the goods had to leave with you.

In short: Automated gates skip the landing stamp shops need, so ask for one on arrival.

Tax-free sales need proof that you are a visitor, and that proof is the landing permission stamp in your passport. The Tax Agency's detailed Q&A is blunt: if the stamp is missing and your status cannot be confirmed, the shop cannot sell to you tax-free.

That catches people who entered through the automated or face-recognition gates, which do not stamp. The fix is at the airport you arrive at: after the gate and before customs, ask the staff at the immigration office for a stamp, and they will add one. Do it on arrival, because you cannot get one later at a shop.

Visit Japan Web offers an alternative, and it carries over into the new system. Since April 2023 a shop may accept its tax-free QR code, shown live on your own phone, in place of the physical passport, for visitors on Temporary Visitor, Diplomat or Official status. Screenshots are not accepted, and shops are free not to take it, so carry the passport anyway.

• Foreign visitors qualify if they are non-residents who can show they have been in Japan for less than six months.
• Temporary Visitor, Diplomat and Official status count, as do transit, cruise, crew and similar landing permits, under a list in force since 1 April 2023.
• Japanese nationals qualify after living abroad for two years or more, within six months of a temporary return, with a passport plus a family register attachment, a residence certificate or, from November, a My Number Card showing the move abroad.

In short: Pay the full price. The ¥5,000 minimum before tax, per store per day, still applies.

You pay the full price, tax included, and show your passport or the Visit Japan Web code. The shop sends a purchase record, keyed to your passport number, to the Tax Agency's system without delay. The shop must also tell you about the 90-day deadline, that customs may ask to see the goods, and that the check cannot be done after your bags are checked in.

The ¥5,000 minimum still applies, before tax, per store per day, now with every item counted together. Gold and platinum bullion and coins are excluded, but jewellery made from them qualifies. The only quantity limit is what you can personally carry out of Japan.

Anything priced at ¥1 million or more before tax is now recorded with identifying details such as its brand, model and, where there is one, its serial number. The government's January 2025 briefing names the reason: stopping luxury watches from being swapped for cheaper ones before export. Customs may also ask for the certificate of authenticity or warranty.

In short: Eat it in Japan and you lose the refund on the whole receipt.

Not if you want the tax back on them. The sealed bags are gone, but the rule behind them is not. The Japan Tourism Agency's traveller FAQ says that if food, drinks or cosmetics are consumed in Japan, you are not eligible for the refund on them, and you should declare it at the customs counter instead of the kiosk.

The catch is how receipts are judged. If even one item from a single purchase is missing at the check, none of the goods on that receipt qualify. Separate receipts and separate shops are judged separately, so the practical move is to ask for gifts and your own snacks to go through as different purchases.

Non-consumables are different. A camera or a jacket can be used in Japan and still qualify, as long as it leaves with you. Keep boxes that carry model numbers, because throwing them away can stop Customs identifying the item.

In short: The kiosk is in the departure lobby, before bag check-in, not after security.

This is the step that will cost people their refunds. The customs check now happens landside, in the international departure lobby, before you hand over any luggage. Under the old system most travellers dealt with customs after security, so habits will be wrong.

Keep every tax-free item with you until the kiosk shows green.

The kiosk takes a few seconds: scan your passport, and the screen shows a result. Green means the check is complete. Red means you take the goods to the customs inspection area nearby, so they have to be with you, not in a suitcase already on the belt.

Liquids and cosmetics that cannot go in the cabin are handled in the right order: scan and, if asked, show them first, then check them in. If you have a domestic connection, do the check at the last Japanese airport before you leave the country. On a cruise that starts and ends abroad, it is the last Japanese port.

In short: 10% or 8% back from the shop, by card, app or cash, minus any fee.

The refund comes from the shop, or a refund company it has hired, not from the government. The Tourism Agency lists bank transfer, card refund, app-based refunds and cash at the departure port as possible methods, and the law itself does not prescribe any: each shop chooses.

Nobody official gives a timeframe. The refund is processed after customs confirms the export, and for details you are told to ask the shop. Customs sends each result through the Tax Agency's system as either confirmed or not exempt, and a not-exempt result never changes back.

How much is that in yen? Consumption tax is 10% on most goods and 8% on food and non-alcoholic drinks bought to take away, according to the Ministry of Finance. Because the tax is already inside the price you paid, the refund is 1/11 of a 10% price (about 9.1%) and 2/27 of an 8% one (about 7.4%). A ¥11,000 jacket gives back up to ¥1,000, and ¥5,400 of snacks up to ¥400, before any fee.

One more change may be coming. On 9 October 2026 the Cabinet approved a bill to cut the tax on food and drink from 8% to 1% for two years from April 2027, Kyodo reported. It is not law yet. If it passes, the refund on snacks and sweets shrinks to match, while the 10% on everything else stays.

Fees are where the fine print will bite. There is no rule on whether the traveller or the shop pays the refund handling fee, and no cap on it. The Tourism Agency notes that abroad the traveller usually pays, and that the government itself charges nothing.

For a sense of scale, department stores such as Takashimaya and Daimaru took 1.55% of the pre-tax price as a handling fee under the old system, and some shops will charge something similar. Others compete on it: PPIH, the group behind Don Quijote, announced no refund fee at its stores from 1 November 2026, except when you take the refund in cash at the airport, where the refund company's own fee applies, and says the terms can change. Read each shop's terms before you rely on the full amount.

• Shops may refund in coupons or points usable only at their own stores, or refund more than the tax as a promotion.
• Shops may set their own deadline for claiming, such as no refund if you have not applied within a set number of days.
• A refund that fails through your own mistake, such as a wrong card or account number, is your loss: the shop still keeps its exemption.
• The national tax-free shop association listed eleven companies preparing to handle refunds as of March 2026, Global Blue among them.

In short: At seven airports Visit Japan Web can stand in for the kiosk, on dedicated Wi-Fi.

The basic route needs no phone at all: passport at the till, passport at the kiosk. But the phone becomes genuinely useful at three points, and at the big airports it shows you something the kiosk cannot.

• At the shop, a live Visit Japan Web tax-free code can stand in for the passport, where the shop accepts it.
• At seven airports, Narita, Haneda, Kansai, Chubu, New Chitose, Fukuoka and Naha, you can do the customs check online through Visit Japan Web, on a dedicated Wi-Fi network in the departure lobby before security. You need to be registered with Visit Japan Web beforehand.
• After the check, many refunds are claimed through the refund company's app or website, and paid to a card or a QR-code wallet.

The online route matters for one reason. The Tax Agency's July 2026 Q&A says it lets you see your purchase history and exactly which receipts turned green and qualify for a refund, details the kiosk terminal does not show. The official texts describe a dedicated airport Wi-Fi for this, not mobile data, so connect to that network in the lobby.

Where mobile data helps is everything around it: loading the refund app, receiving the card-refund notice, and sorting out a problem with a shop's support before you board. How much data you really need in Japan puts numbers on a two-week trip, and why your phone can't call or text in Japan explains why a bank's SMS code may not reach you there at all.

In short: No check within 90 days means no refund, and keeping confirmed goods in Japan is punished.

The Tax Agency's notice to travellers puts it plainly: "No Customs procedure, No Refund." After 90 days without a check, the system marks the purchase not exempt, and the tax you paid at the till stays paid.

The 90 days run from the day after purchase. The Tax Agency's own example: buy on 1 November, and the deadline for the customs check is 30 January of the following year. That comfortably covers a long trip, but not a resident who leaves Japan months later.

Getting confirmed and then not exporting is the serious case. Under the new Article 8(6), Customs collects the tax from you immediately, and Article 65 sets a penalty of up to one year's imprisonment or a fine of up to ¥500,000 for failing to export confirmed goods without good reason.

Lost or renewed your passport mid-trip? Scan the new one at the kiosk and tell a customs officer at the counter that you also bought goods on the old one.

In short: Posting goods yourself gets no refund. Shipping arranged by the shop still works.

Sending tax-free purchases home by EMS and showing the postal receipt at the airport stopped working on 31 March 2025, well before the refund method arrived. Goods posted separately cannot get a customs confirmation, so under the new system they simply get no refund.

Shipping arranged by the shop is still allowed, and suits anything too big or too liquid to carry. If you sign a delivery contract in the store and the shop hands the goods to the carrier, it counts as an ordinary export: no ¥5,000 minimum, no customs check at departure, and the shop can sell at the price without tax. Not every shop offers it.

In short: Resellers used the old system as a wholesale channel, and the tax was rarely recovered.

Because the old system was being used as a wholesale channel. The government's January 2025 briefing counted 690 departing buyers between April 2022 and March 2024 who had each spent ¥100 million or more tax-free, worth ¥233.2 billion between them.

Nearly 90% of those big buyers were never caught, and almost all who were assessed never paid, the briefing says, because most had left the country without the money to settle. The customs check was voluntary, and nobody could be stopped from leaving for refusing it.

The Board of Audit found the same leak from another side. In an October 2024 finding it estimated about ¥340 million in tax lost at Narita and Haneda, including buyers who reached the check-in desk just before it closed. Nikkei reported one visitor who had bought about ¥1.3 billion of goods.

Honest travellers paid for it too. Some shops capped tax-free sales or stopped offering them. The Tourism Agency's count of tax-free shops fell for the first time since 2022, to 64,127 at 31 March 2026, down 372 in six months.

The stakes are large. Visitors spent a record ¥9.45 trillion in Japan in 2025, about ¥61,000 of each visitor's ¥229,000 on shopping, and JNTO counted a record 42.68 million arrivals. Europe has long run a similar model: the EU gives visitors a VAT refund when goods are shown to customs within three months of purchase.

In short: ¥3,000 per departure since 1 July 2026, already in your ticket price.

Tax-free shopping is not the only thing that changed at the border this year. The International Tourist Tax, Japan's departure tax, tripled from ¥1,000 to ¥3,000 on 1 July 2026.

You do not pay it at the airport. Airlines and shipping lines add it to the ticket price. Children under two are exempt, as are transit passengers who leave within 24 hours on a through ticket, and crew fall outside the tax. Tickets bought before 1 July 2026 with the departure date already fixed keep the old ¥1,000 rate; changing that date on or after 1 July brings in the new one.

Where you sleep costs more too. Kyoto raised its accommodation tax on 1 March 2026 to between ¥200 and ¥10,000 per person per night, depending on the room rate, and Okinawa Prefecture adds a 2% lodging tax, capped at ¥2,000, from 1 February 2027.

In short: Not running yet, and no word on how it fits the stamp rule.

Not yet. JESTA, Japan's electronic travel authorisation, was enacted on 29 May 2026, and it must start by 31 March 2029 on a date still to be set. Until then there is nothing to apply for.

One detail to watch: the new law lets immigration skip the landing stamp for travellers holding a JESTA authorisation, and tax-free sales currently depend on that stamp. No official guidance yet explains how the two will fit together, so this is a rule to recheck before a trip in 2028 or later.

For everything else about the trip, networks, SIM rules and data sizes, see Best eSIM for Japan. Travelling on by rail? Two weeks in Japan by train runs Tokyo to Hiroshima. Plans are on the Japan destination page, and a regional Asia plan covers onward legs to South Korea or Taiwan.

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