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The story
On 5ch’s News Express+ board, data on monthly living expenses by household income sparked discussion. Households earning under 2 million yen a year reportedly spend 173,000 yen a month — more than their annual income would suggest — while households earning 15 million yen or more spend 591,000 yen, highlighting a stark gap.
In response to the question “isn’t it strange that living costs exceed income?”, commenters pointed to pensioners drawing down savings and differences in Engel’s coefficient (the share of spending that goes to food).
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Key points
– The average monthly living expense for two-or-more-person households nationwide is 314,000 yen.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Household income of 15 million yen or more.
This survey doesn't even list household size, so it's kind of a garbage study…
That's gotta be fake. Welfare recipients (namapo) live on under 100,000 yen a month, don't they?
Probably rising utility and rent costs. I'm in Saitama, and rent has shot up brutally this year. I've seriously considered moving from Saitama City to Kawagoe.
28 years old, 185cm tall, 25 million yen a year — got a problem with that?
Sorry, you win. Started at 6 million fresh out of school, now in my fifth year making 7.5 million. Guess a college with a hensachi (deviation score, Japan's standardized measure of academic difficulty) of 65 just doesn't cut it.
I've been a JRA (Central Horse Racing) jockey for 40 years — I lose on age (57) and height (170cm), but my prize money and riding fees this year might edge out yours a bit.
40,000 yen of that is probably from consumer loans…
Probably pensioners drawing down their savings.
173,000 x 12 = 2,076,000
Wait, huh?
That's probably just living expenses lol, no taxes included lolol
But Japan's ultra-rich don't spend their money anyway.
So more hyper-rich people supposedly means more growth — but growth of what, exactly?
By that logic the Arab states should be the most developed nations around. And if you're going to claim they are, then why isn't any Arab country in the G7?
Cigarettes: 15,000 yen
Utilities: just under 15,000 yen
Own my home outright
(´・ω・`)
Property tax… where'd that go… phone/internet bill? Subscriptions? And why are your utilities so cheap?
Yeah, if you average it out including health insurance and national pension, it comes to about 100,000 yen.
(´・ω・`)
With a household income of 2 million yen, it's basically one of two options: rent in the 30,000-yen range and 130,000 yen for everything else, or rent in the 60,000-yen range and everything else in the low 100,000s. Because if you try to keep non-rent spending under 100,000 yen, there's almost nothing left for food. That's the reality at the bottom. No wonder people can't afford books, let alone a newspaper or NHK fees. And when this becomes society's core demographic, that's when you start hearing 'the earth is flat,' 'vaccines make people crazy,' Ministry of Finance conspiracy theories, or 'the JAL crash was a cover-up.'
Think about Japan's average age… most people are past 10 million by then, and plenty are past 15 million too.
For the child-rearing generation it's 8 million yen. It's just that there are so many retired pensioners dragging the average down.
Wait, isn't that more than the annual income?
Pensioners drawing down their savings.
Their savings rate is like -60%.
– 2-2.5 million yen: 192,000 yen ← up to here is the range where national-pension retirees draw down savings
– 2.5-3 million yen: 216,000 yen
– 3-3.5 million yen: 241,000 yen
– 3.5-4 million yen: 260,000 yen
– 4-4.5 million yen: 265,000 yen
– 4.5-5 million yen: 279,000 yen
– 5-5.5 million yen: 292,000 yen
– 5.5-6 million yen: 298,000 yen
– 6-6.5 million yen: 300,000 yen
– 6.5-7 million yen: 315,000 yen
– 7-7.5 million yen: 319,000 yen
– 7.5-8 million yen: 318,000 yen
– 8-9 million yen: 350,000 yen ← average for the child-rearing generation, includes added child-rearing costs
– 9-10 million yen: 366,000 yen
– 10-12.5 million yen: 432,000 yen ← for child-rearing households, this also includes private middle-school exam prep costs
– 12.5-15 million yen: 467,000 yen
– 15 million yen or more: 591,000 yen
Actually, the average spending for a 3-person household is around 300,000 yen, so the average for the child-rearing generation is probably more like the 6-6.5 million yen bracket.
https://www.bk.mufg.jp/column/others/b0079.html
https://www.bk.mufg.jp/column/others/img/b0079_img05.jpg
This is from 2023 statistics.
6-6.5 million yen? (ヾﾉ･∀･`) no way, no way
● For reference, the 2-million-yen households have an Engel's coefficient of 35%. They're scraping by just to eat.
The average annual income for households under 2 million yen is 1.53 million yen. Monthly consumption spending is 170,000 yen, food is 60,000 yen (Engel's coefficient 35%), utilities/water are 20,000 yen, transport/communication is 17,000 yen, education/language study is 15,000 yen, and other miscellaneous expenses are 22,000 yen.
Well, obviously.
Originally it's just 'consumption spending' being called 'living expenses.'
Background and Key Points
The figures come from Japan’s Family Income and Expenditure Survey (家計調査), run by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, which tracks two-or-more-person households by annual income bracket. It reports gross consumption spending, not just visible cash income, and it lumps together very different households within the same bracket: a working single mother, a couple in their 30s, and an 80-year-old retired couple can all fall into “under 2 million yen a year” despite having nothing else in common. The 314,000-yen national average cited in the piece is the same survey’s overall two-or-more-person figure, useful as a benchmark against which both the bottom and top brackets look extreme.
Where the thread actually diverged was on whether the “under 2 million yen households spend 173,000 yen a month” line is even plausible. One camp treated it as a data artifact, comparing it unfavorably to Japan’s welfare (seikatsu hogo) minimum, which can leave recipients living on well under 100,000 yen monthly. The other camp, which won out by the later posts with sourced figures, argued this bracket is dominated by pension-income retirees who are deliberately drawing down savings rather than earning enough to cover spending — a well-documented and normal pattern in Japanese retirement finance.
What the thread never states outright is that this is a household-count survey, not a size- or age-adjusted one: it doesn’t separate single-elderly, single working-age, or family households, so bracket-to-bracket comparisons of “spending vs. income” are structurally misleading rather than evidence of anything alarming.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “Monthly Living Expenses by Household Income, Latest Data: High-Income Households Top ¥590,000 a Month”.
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