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The story
According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ National Survey of Family Income, Consumption and Wealth, the average annual income (household income) for single-person households reached ¥3.712 million in 2024, up 8.6% from ¥3.417 million in 2019. A thread on the News Speed+ board, sparked by this age-bracket breakdown, spiraled into singles earning around ¥6 million sharing how they’re actually building assets, a debate over whether the average or the median better reflects reality, and questions about how the survey counts non-regular employment and how real wages and price indices are even calculated.
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[Average Income for Singles] Household income hits ¥3.712 million, up 8.6% from ¥3.417 million five years ago
The National Survey of Family Income, Consumption and Wealth is conducted every five years to examine household income, assets, and more. In 2024, the average annual income per single-person household (household income) was ¥3.712 million, up 8.6% from ¥3.417 million in 2019.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
No expensive hobbies, and even after spending ¥1,000-1,500 on lunch every single day,
I can still put around ¥100,000 a month into investments.
Guess you could call that lucky… or pathetic, since I still can't manage to get married…
More like, is ¥6 million even enough once you're past 40?
Not trolling or bragging here, but at "old man" age with that income, there's no room left to grow.
5ch regulars always start in with the "rural vs. the city" stuff, but no matter where you live, that income isn't enough to do what you actually want.
I've got over ¥30 million in assets, FYI.
And how do you think people making ¥3-4 million a year are even getting by?
Maybe learn some basic common sense first.
Huh, bottom-rung old guys always jump straight to "I've got tens of millions in assets!" but even if you'd been earning ¥6 million since your first job out of college, you couldn't save or invest nearly that much.
From the bottom looking up, ¥6 million might sound like you're swimming in savings and investments, but take-home pay on that is only around ¥4.5 million, you know.
Someone making ¥3-4 million with no rent to pay could easily have ¥50 million in assets, you know.
Whether you're above or below this number doesn't change your life one bit.
Internet people always jump straight to "the median!" but even if there are tons of poor people out there, that doesn't fix the fact that your own income is low.
Bringing up such a weird edge case doesn't really prove anything.
I've also got ¥100 million in assets.
My parents died and I inherited it.
Nice.
I'm aiming to hit ¥50 million by 60, for starters.
Try earning ¥100 million on your own before you count it as an asset.
No — the wealth gap has exploded. Most of the profit companies make off inflation goes straight to executive pay and shareholder returns, so investors are making an abnormal killing.
People who work hard and play by the rules just keep getting squeezed, but because investors' gains are so outsized, it averages out to make it look like wages rose this much.
5 years ago → now
¥3.8 million → ¥3.84 million
But according to the National Tax Agency's Private Sector Salary Survey,
the median actually went DOWN from 5 years ago lmaooooo
wait, what lol
That ¥40,000 median bump above is from the "dota" survey (likely the one cited above).
But the Tax Agency's numbers are more accurate, right? lol
Internet people love the median, but all it really tells you is that there are a lot of poor people out there — it's not something that should make you feel better about your own situation.
Wannabe-investor margin gamblers just get wiped out and exit the game.
The real issue is that capitalism itself is broken — a system where "fake" industries (finance, speculation) pay vastly more than real, productive ones.
And on top of that, the wealthy hide the fact that they're exploiting the masses by preaching liberal ideology to justify that exploitation.
Fair point. Unless the people actually producing things can earn more, the whole country just withers away.
Maybe we're talking about the median here, not the average?
The number in Re: #1 is the average.
The median is even lower, and it's actually dropped over the past 5 years.
In the Ministry of Internal Affairs' Annual Report on the Family Income and Expenditure Survey, official median figures for monthly "actual income," "disposable income," and "consumption expenditure" aren't published.
That's because the survey's main purpose is to quickly report and analyze average household trends, which makes it hard to calculate a detailed monthly distribution (i.e., the median) for each item.
However, estimating from that survey's "data by annual income bracket" and other government statistics, here's a rough picture of what the median likely looks like.
Estimated median figures
Since a handful of high-income households pull the average up,
the median tends to run about 10-15% lower than the average.
Here's the rough breakdown:
Actual income (gross)
~¥550,000-580,000
Disposable income (take-home)
~¥450,000-480,000
Consumption expenditure (living costs)
~¥330,000-350,000
Surplus (amount available to save)
~¥80,000-100,000
Real consumption spending has been negative for 9 straight months now, though.
Real wages have been positive for 8 months, so people are probably just cutting back on spending.
The fact that households' savings capacity keeps rising is proof of that —
seems like folks are funneling money into savings instead of spending it.
Everything's gotten so brutally expensive that we're cutting back too — our household spending has probably gone down if anything lol
And before that, statistical fraud is already rampant to begin with lol
Even going by the government's own cherry-picked numbers (that fraudulent 2.1% inflation figure), they admit real wages have fallen more than 10% over the past 5 years.
And the real situation is even worse than that (most of the inflated items are food and daily necessities — basically hyperinflation aimed straight at ordinary people).
Didn't they exclude the food items with the worst price hikes from the price index?
That's a genuinely dirty trick.
If you're talking about core CPI or core-core CPI, you should probably just stay quiet — that's embarrassing.
Yeah.
The nationwide core CPI inflation rate published by the Ministry of Internal Affairs excludes fresh food,
and it lumps in a bunch of items like cars that most people rarely ever buy (and those items don't go up in price much anyway).
Background and Key Points of the Debate
The National Survey of Family Income, Consumption and Wealth is a statistic the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications conducts once every five years, covering not just income but assets and debts as well. The ¥3.712 million figure here is the “average” household income for single-person households. Commenters pointed out that the survey’s figures include not just full-time employees but also temp staff, part-timers, and other employment types, and that averages tend to get pulled upward by a minority of high earners, creating a gap with the median, which more closely matches how most people actually feel about their income. Some even cited a separate National Tax Agency statistic showing the median income for full-time employees has stayed roughly flat, raising the question of how much the “wages have risen” narrative depends on which statistic you’re looking at. Judging the real situation purely by the rise in the average risks overlooking these underlying caveats.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “[Singles] Average Income by Age Bracket — Overall Single-Household Income Rises from ¥3.417 Million Five Years Ago to ¥3.712 Million.”
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