Tokyo’s Lodging Tax Becomes 3% of the Room Rate on 1 April 2027

Affiliate disclosure. Some articles on this site contain affiliate links. If you use one and book or buy something, I may receive a small commission; it costs you nothing extra. A commission never buys a recommendation — if something isn’t worth your money, the article says so. Full details in the privacy policy.

What you will actually pay

From 1 April 2027, Tokyo’s lodging tax stops being a flat ¥100 or ¥200 and becomes 3% of the room rate, charged per person, per night.

Two things decide what you owe:

• Under ¥13,000 per person per night, you pay nothing. The exemption line rises from ¥10,000 to ¥13,000.
• At ¥13,000 or more, it is 3% — worked out on the room rate before consumption tax.

There is one rounding step that is easy to miss. The ordinance sets the taxable amount as the room rate for one person for one night, and then says that if that amount has a remainder below ¥100, the remainder is dropped. So the room rate is rounded down to the nearest ¥100 first, and the 3% is taken from that.

These examples are mine, not the city’s. Tokyo publishes the 3% rate and the rounding rule, but it does not publish any worked calculation. The lines above are arithmetic from those two published rules, shown so you can see how the rounding lands. If a hotel’s figure differs from mine, the hotel’s figure is the one that was filed.

For a sense of scale: under the present system nobody pays more than ¥200 a night, however expensive the room. From April 2027 a ¥30,000 room carries ¥900, and a ¥60,000 room carries ¥1,800. For a cheap room the change runs the other way — a ¥12,000 room is taxed ¥100 today and nothing at all afterwards.

Which places charge it

Today the tax reaches hotels and ryokan. From 1 April 2027 the ordinance is rewritten to cover the hotel-and-inn business under the Hotel Business Act with boarding houses excluded, which brings in simple lodgings — the category most hostels and guesthouses are licensed under — and it adds both kinds of private lodging:

• Special-zone private lodging (特区民泊), licensed under the National Strategic Special Zones Act.
• Notified private lodging (新法民泊), registered under the Housing Accommodation Business Act — the route most short-term rental listings use.

Tokyo’s own estimate is that about 30% of private lodgings will end up above the ¥13,000 line and so inside the tax. The rest sit below it and are untouched, which is why the city describes private lodgings as a mostly low-priced field with a high-priced minority.

Your nationality and where you live make no difference. The city states plainly that it will carry on making no distinction by nationality or place of residence — the tax follows the act of staying, not the person.

What counts as the room rate, and what does not

This is the part that decides whether you are over or under the ¥13,000 line, so it is worth reading even if the rest is familiar. Tokyo publishes the breakdown on the page written for accommodation operators.

Counted in the room rate: the room charge itself, plus anything billed to you whether or not you asked for it — bedding charges, bathing charges, nightwear charges, heating and cooling charges, cleaning charges, and service charges. Lodging subsidies and grants count too.

Left out: meals and drinks provided with the stay; entertainment, banquets, weddings, parking and day-use rest; consumption tax, local consumption tax, bathing tax and other taxes; amounts the accommodation pays on your behalf and bills you for, such as taxi fares, cigarettes, phone calls and laundry; and anything you hand over voluntarily, such as a tip.

Two of those matter more than the rest:

• A compulsory service charge is inside the figure. If a hotel adds a service charge you cannot decline, it counts towards the ¥13,000.
• Consumption tax is outside it. The judgment is made on the pre-tax room rate. A room advertised at ¥14,300 including 10% consumption tax is ¥13,000 before tax — on the line, not comfortably over it.

The 2027 change does not touch any of this. In the before-and-after comparison tables the city published, the provisions that define the room rate are carried over unchanged; what changes is the exemption figure, the rate, and which places are covered.

If you stay more than one night

The tax is worked out per person, per night, and the ordinance says so in both places that matter: the exemption applies to a stay under ¥13,000 for one person for one night, and the taxable amount is the room rate for one person for one night.

So each night stands on its own. Three nights at ¥14,000 is three separate calculations of ¥420, or ¥1,260 in total. If your rate moves during the stay — a weekend night priced higher than a weekday one — each night is judged against the ¥13,000 line separately, and a night below it is simply not taxed.

There is no official guidance on consecutive nights. The city’s pages and the ordinance do not use the idea at all: there is no cap for long stays, no reduced rate after a certain number of nights, and no worked explanation of a multi-night bill. The per-night wording is the whole of it.

Who you pay, and when

The tax is levied on you, the guest. You are not the one who files anything, though: the accommodation is made a special collecting agent, takes the tax from you, and passes it to the city itself. There is no form for you to fill in and nothing to do at the airport.

What the rules do not settle is the point at which it leaves your hands. The ordinance fixes only that the accommodation collects it and remits it; it says nothing about whether that happens inside the total you pay when you book, or separately at the front desk. That is left to the accommodation and the booking platform, so the practical answer is to look at what your booking actually itemises, and to expect that a figure quoted to you as the room price may not have the tax in it yet.

Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka are not the same

If your trip takes in more than one city, the lodging tax is not one national rule. The three that most visitors meet are set separately, and from April 2027 Tokyo is the only one of the three charging a percentage — Kyoto and Osaka both use fixed amounts per price band.

Two consequences worth knowing before you book:

• Tokyo’s exemption line is the highest of the three — ¥13,000, against Osaka’s ¥5,000 and Kyoto’s none at all. A cheap room in Kyoto is taxed; the same room in Tokyo is not.
• At the top end the order reverses. On a ¥100,000 room the arithmetic gives ¥3,000 in Tokyo, ¥10,000 in Kyoto and ¥500 in Osaka. On a ¥15,000 room it is ¥450, ¥400 and ¥400 — near enough the same.

Kyoto and Osaka set their own rules and have both changed them recently — Osaka in September 2025, Kyoto in March 2026. The figures above were checked against those two cities’ own pages on 15 September 2026; if you are reading much later, check them again.

What the official pages do not say

Four gaps, stated plainly, because they are the questions people arrive with:

• No worked example of the 3%. The city publishes the rate and the rounding rule, but not a single calculation showing them applied. The table earlier in this article is my arithmetic, not theirs.
• Nothing on consecutive nights. The word does not appear. There is no cap, no long-stay rate, and no illustration of a multi-night bill.
• The amended ordinance is not yet readable as a web page. As of 15 September 2026 the new wording exists only inside the before-and-after comparison PDFs; the version of the ordinance published as HTML is still the current one.
• The page announcing the change carries no update date. There is no “last revised” line on it, so there is no way to tell from the page itself when it was last touched.

The change itself is settled, not proposed: the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly passed it on 27 March 2026, and the Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications consented on 30 June 2026. The start date of 1 April 2027 comes from the ordinance.

Quick version

Facts, dates and sources