If you have claimed VAT back before

What carries over

If you have claimed VAT back leaving the EU, or GST leaving Australia, the shape of the Japanese system from November 1, 2026 will be familiar: pay in full, prove at the border that the goods are leaving, get the tax back afterwards. The instinct to keep purchases reachable at the airport carries over. So does the habit of keeping receipts together.

What does not carry over

• The threshold works differently. Japan's is ¥5,000 excluding tax at one shop on one day. It is not a trip total, and receipts from different shops cannot be combined.
• The arithmetic is one eleventh, not ten per cent. Japanese tags are tax-included, so a ¥10,000 tag holds ¥909.
• You have a hard deadline. 90 days from each purchase to leave the country.
• The fee is unknown. Travellers who remember a commercial refund company taking a large cut in Europe want to know the Japanese equivalent. It has not been published.

Two things we cannot answer for you

Readers of this site fly home to dozens of different countries, and there are two questions where the answer depends on yours rather than on Japan.

1. What your own country lets you bring in. Every country sets its own allowance for goods brought back by a returning traveller, and a large tax-free purchase in Japan can be large enough to matter at your own border. Check your own customs authority. We do not publish other countries' allowances, because we would be copying figures we cannot verify and that change without telling us.
2. What exchange rate you will get. The refund is a yen figure. What lands in your account is that figure after your card issuer converts it. We do not publish a rate, and any site that quotes you one is quoting a number that was already out of date when it was typed.

Compare the yen figure on your receipt with the yen figure on your statement. That is the only comparison that isolates the fee from the exchange rate.