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The story
On September 4, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare held the first meeting of an expert panel reviewing the “Category 3 insured persons” system, which lets the spouses of company employees receive the basic pension without paying premiums individually. The number of people covered has roughly halved from its peak at the end of fiscal 1995, standing at about 6.04 million as of the end of fiscal 2025, as dual-income households have become more common. The ministry aims to sort out the key issues this fiscal year and feed them into the next pension system reform in 2030. On 5ch, criticism that “it’s unfair to get a pension without paying premiums” collided head-on with rebuttals that “the cost is actually built into the spouse’s employees’ pension premiums,” and the debate spread to cover the difference with self-employed people’s national pension and how to treat households raising children.
On the 4th, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare held the first meeting of an expert panel reviewing the “Category 3 insured persons” system, under which full-time homemakers and others who are dependents of company employees can receive the basic pension without paying premiums. The panel will examine the actual situation with a view to narrowing the scope of eligible people in response to changing social conditions, such as the rise of dual-income households. It aims to sort out the issues this fiscal year and reflect them in the next pension system reform in 2030.
Category 3 insured persons are spouses of company employees enrolled in the employees’ pension system, and in principle must meet requirements such as earning under 1.3 million yen a year. 98% are women, and about half work part-time or other short hours. With the rise of dual-income households, the number has roughly halved from its peak at the end of fiscal 1995 to about 6.04 million at the end of fiscal 2025.
In recent years, there have been repeated cases of homemakers working part-time jobs adjusting their hours to stay under the dependent-income threshold in order to boost take-home pay, creating labor shortages for companies. The government has taken steps such as easing the requirements for enrolling in the employees’ pension, but the Category 3 system still draws strong criticism — the Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengo), for one, says it “hinders women’s career development and fuels the gender pay gap.”
Source: jiji.com / Original article here
What people said
In Denmark you get a basic pension of 400,000 yen even without paying in
It's included in the husband's employees' pension premiums
That was the original idea, sure, but as dual-income households increased, public attitudes shifted.
Biased trash-media ("masugomi") coverage painted it as a free ride, which made it worse.
Then the husband should have to pay double
Because the company also chips in for the employees' pension
Sounds like you don't even know the difference between employees' pension and national pension
They should slap a poll tax of 2 million yen a year on childless people
People with kids pay way more in total taxes.
Childless people pay less, so they've always been the ones getting subsidized.
Tax paid across two generations (parent and child) is far more than what someone whose line ends with them pays
First, learn the difference between national pension and employees' pension
"Hasn't paid a single yen" → wrong.
The national pension premium self-employed people pay and the employees' pension premium company employees pay are different amounts.
So-called intergenerational exploitation. A pyramid scheme in its death throes.
Young people back around 1995 were saying the exact same thing — "I don't expect a pension, I'll never get one anyway" — and now they're about to hit pension age. Young people always say the same thing.
Work just means getting fed on by the elderly through heavy, no-return social insurance premiums. Working is for suckers.
The unfairness comes from the state judging this and only paying welfare to people who meet its criteria — and the state's criteria aren't even rational to begin with. A basic income that automatically pays every citizen the same amount would be better.
Why not just have a doctor decide?
Then just live out a poor old age, that's fine
And that's exactly why universal health insurance should be torn down
However you slice it, isn't universal health insurance benefiting people like you the most?
According to generational accounting estimates, today's young people are running a net negative 60 million yen on social security. Put a "scrap social security" button in front of them and they'd mash it instantly. We shouldn't be burdening young people like this.
Same with taxes — it's clearly the low-income beneficiaries who complain the loudest. That's just how the world works.
Exactly right. Social security should be converted into basic income and distributed fairly and equally.
Hand out basic income like that and low-wage workers disappear — you sure that's okay?
You think people are arguing without knowing that? These days there are a lot of single people, and Category 3 means singles end up paying for someone else's wife. A lot of the criticism of Category 3 actually comes from women themselves.
But employees' pension premiums don't distinguish between married and unmarried, right? If married husbands were paying extra, that argument would hold up, but unmarried people pay the same rate, so it holds zero water.
The people criticizing Category 3 the most aren't the self-employed (Category 1) — it's dual-income earners paying premiums (Category 2), especially women.
The core of Category 3 is part-time housewives raising kids. If you're going to call that intergenerational exploitation too, women will struggle to see the benefit not just of having kids but of marrying at all. There's no need to support the elderly to that extent.
Category 3 applies even to people without kids, so that argument is nothing but a sham
There's room for improvement there. Current Category 3 holders without kids could reasonably be excluded across the board.
That's just because the current system is flawed. The right approach is to cut all social security for the childless.
Background and Key Points
The Category 3 insured persons system was introduced in 1986, letting full-time homemakers (or house-husbands) in company-employee households receive the basic pension without paying premiums individually. In reality, those premiums aren’t “free” at all — they’re processed as part of the employees’ pension premiums paid by the working spouse, a point that’s easy to misunderstand, and the thread saw a head-on clash between the “hasn’t paid a single yen” criticism and the “it’s handled within the employees’ pension framework” rebuttal. The number of people covered has roughly halved from its peak at the end of fiscal 1995 to about 6.04 million at the end of fiscal 2025, as the rise of dual-income households erodes the system’s original premise. The debate centers on two main points — fairness versus self-employed spouses (Category 1) and dual-income households (Category 2), and how to support child-rearing households if the system shrinks — with the conversation even stretching to radical alternatives like basic income. This is just the starting point of discussions ahead of the next pension system reform in 2030, and for now remains at the fact-finding stage.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “Fact-finding investigation into pension “Category 3” — ministry panel begins discussion on narrowing eligibility.”
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