Japan Before 1 November 2026: The System That Is Ending

Japan tax free on a ¥110,000 purchase pays ¥10,000, and until 31 October 2026 that money never leaves your hands: the shop sells at the tax-excluded price and you walk out having paid ¥100,000. From 1 November the same purchase costs ¥110,000 at the register and the ¥10,000 comes back later, after customs confirms at departure that the goods are leaving.

The rate does not change. The floor does not change. What changes is who holds the money, for how long, and whether a fee comes out of it.

And the cutover is not the one most travel pages describe. It is decided by the date on the receipt, not the date on your boarding pass — the National Tax Agency’s own Q&A says the refund method applies to sales made on or after 1 November 2026, not to departures. Buy on 31 October and fly on 5 November and you are on the old system, with the tax already off.

What Japan tax free pays, to 31 October 2026

Japan’s consumption tax is 10%, with a reduced 8% rate on food and non-alcoholic drinks. Both sit inside the displayed price, because Japanese retailers are required to show the tax-included total.

So the saving is not 10% of what you see on the tag. It is 10/110 of it — 9.09% — and on the reduced rate it is 8/108, or 7.41%. The same arithmetic as every European desk, with different numerators: why 20% VAT is only 16.7% of what you paid.

Nothing is deducted from those figures. Under the exemption method there is no refund operator in the transaction at all, because there is no refund — the tax is simply not charged. That is the single largest difference between Japan today and the bordereau, the PABLO kiosk and the €100 minimum, where a quarter of the reclaimable amount goes to whoever processes the form.

The ¥5,000 floor, and the ¥500,000 ceiling that only applies to food and cosmetics

Two amounts, and they do not work the same way.

The floor is ¥5,000, counted as the total sold to one non-resident at one shop on one day, and counted on the tax-excluded figure. A ¥5,400 shelf price is ¥4,909 before tax and does not clear it. A ¥5,500 shelf price is exactly ¥5,000 and does.

The ceiling is ¥500,000, and only on consumables. The Japan Tourism Agency’s own leaflet splits goods into two classes:

• General goods (一般物品) — electronics, bags, shoes, clothing, watches, jewellery, crafts. Floor of ¥5,000, no upper limit.
• Consumables (消耗品) — food, drink including sake, cosmetics, medicines. ¥5,000 to ¥500,000, same shop, same day.

A traveller buying a camera and a box of cosmetics in the same department store is running two separate totals against two separate rules, and a shop assistant deciding which basket a cosmetic brush belongs to is making the call that decides whether the ¥500,000 ceiling applies.

Both classes, and both numbers, stop existing on 1 November — what the new system does with them.

The packaging rule that is about to disappear

This is the part of the current system travellers actually trip over, and it is worth understanding precisely because it is in its last fortnight.

Consumables bought tax-free must be sealed in packaging by a designated method and must not be opened before you leave Japan. The Tourism Agency’s leaflet is specific about what that means: a plastic bag or a cardboard box, strong enough to survive to departure, closed with a tape or sticker that shows if it has been opened, with the contents and quantities identifiable — a transparent bag, or an itemised list attached to a box — and a notice in Japanese and at least one other language saying not to open it.

The buyer also signs a pledge to export the consumables within 30 days of purchase.

Three readings a reader can use this month:

• The bag is not a souvenir wrapper. Opening it in Japan makes the goods consumed here, and the consumption tax becomes collectable.
• Thirty days is a real clock on the food and cosmetics half, and it is the tighter of the two windows under the current rules.
• For general goods I could not find a published day count. The Tourism Agency’s consumer materials state the ¥5,000 floor, the ¥500,000 consumables band, the packaging method and the 30-day consumables pledge; they do not put a day limit on a camera. Travel pages that give “six months” are, as far as I can trace it, repeating the separate eligibility test — you qualify as a temporary visitor, not a resident. From 1 November there is one explicit clock on everything, and it is 90 days.

The cutover is the sale date, not your flight

The National Tax Agency’s Q&A on the refund method answers this directly, and it is the question every page about the change gets wrong by omission.

The refund method applies from sales made on or after 1 November 2026, under the transitional provision of the amending act — not from the traveller’s departure date. There is no transition period in which the two systems run side by side: a shop either operates the new method from that day or cannot sell tax-free at all.

There is even an answer for the hour either side of midnight. A shop open until 01:00 that books the 00:00–01:00 trade on 1 November as part of its 31 October sales may process those sales under the old method. For a shopper that is noise; for anyone wondering whether the boundary is soft, it is as hard as a boundary gets, and it is drawn on the till.

The shops that will stop being tax-free on 31 October

A second date worth knowing, because it is about the shop rather than you.

Shops holding a tax-free permit on 31 October 2026 are deemed to hold the new-system permit on 1 November, so most places that are tax-free today simply continue. But a shop that has not filed the notification covering electronic transmission of purchase records by 31 October loses its permit that day. Electronic transmission has been the only route since the Japan Tourism Agency moved the procedure fully off paper on 1 October 2021, so this should be a small population — but it is not zero, and it is the one way a shop that displayed a tax-free sign in October is not a tax-free shop in November.

If a specific purchase matters, the thing to confirm in the shop is that they are doing tax-free in November, not that they do it today.

Is it worth buying before the change?

Flatly: for most purchases, no, and the ladder above is why. The amount is identical either side of 1 November. What differs is the float and the friction.

What you gain by buying before the change, on a ¥110,000 purchase:

The threshold, stated plainly. Below about ¥50,000 of planned spending the whole question is worth a few thousand yen of float and nothing else; buy when you were going to buy. Above roughly ¥300,000 — a camera body, a watch, a lens — the difference is a ¥30,000 interest-free loan to a Japanese retailer plus an airport queue you can currently skip, and if the purchase was already going to happen in the same trip, moving it to October is free. Do not extend a trip, reroute a flight or buy something you were not going to buy in order to beat the date. The tax is 9.09% and the change costs you none of it.

The post that actually decides whether a Japanese purchase is cheaper than the same object at home is a corridor post, not this one; this is only the tax term. The general version of that threshold is below what figure a refund is not worth claiming.

Where it goes wrong

The consumables bag was opened in Japan. The goods count as consumed here and the tax is collectable. This is the most common failure in the current system and it disappears on 1 November — but not before.

Two purchases at the same shop on the same day were not combined. The ¥5,000 floor is a daily per-shop total, so two ¥3,000 receipts at the same store clear it and two at different stores do not. Ask at the first till.

The tax-free counter closed before the shop did. In the current system the paperwork happens in the shop, and in a department store that is a specific counter with its own hours.

A duty-free shop was mistaken for a tax-free one. Airside duty-free and in-city tax-free are two mechanisms with two different sums — duty-free shop or tax-free refund.

The receipt is dated 1 November. Then the old method does not apply to it, whatever the shop told you on 30 October.

How Japan sits against the European desks is in what each country's desk requires; what replaces all of the above is pay the tax, claim it at departure, and the passport-and-code chain that survives the change is the passport scan and the QR code.

Japan’s standard consumption tax rate of 10% and reduced rate of 8% on food and non-alcoholic beverages are as published by the National Tax Agency. The ¥5,000 purchase floor counted per non-resident, per shop, per day on the tax-excluded amount, the ¥5,000–¥500,000 band and designated sealed packaging for consumables, the packaging specification (plastic bag or cardboard box, tamper-evident seal, identifiable contents and quantities, warning notice in Japanese and a foreign language) and the 30-day export pledge for consumables are as stated in the Japan Tourism Agency’s consumption tax-free system materials for foreign travellers. Full electronic transmission of purchase records has applied since 1 October 2021, per the Japan Tourism Agency. That the refund method applies to sales made on or after 1 November 2026 rather than to departures, that no period of parallel operation exists, the treatment of sales booked between 00:00 and 01:00 on 1 November, the deeming of existing tax-free permits into the new system, and the loss of permit on 31 October 2026 for shops that have not filed the purchase-record notification are as stated in the National Tax Agency’s Q&A on the move to the refund method (リファンド方式・概要編), questions 8, 9 and 10, citing the amending act and ordinance. Checked 18 October 2026. Rules are jurisdictional and they change; this is reporting, not tax or legal advice.

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