A qualifying employee for Japan's Management Visa (経営・管理) is a Japanese national, a Special Permanent Resident, a Permanent Resident, the spouse or child of a Japanese national, or a Long-Term Resident (定住者), hired full-time and enrolled in employment and social insurance. A foreign national on a work visa, an intra-company transferee, or a student visa holder does not qualify, no matter how skilled or well-paid the role.
What Changed in the October 2025 Reform?
Effective October 16, 2025, the Immigration Control Act (入管法) standards for the Management Visa require paid-in capital of at least JPY 30 million and at least one qualifying full-time employee in addition to the applicant. The pre-reform alternative, capital of JPY 5 million or two or more employees of any status, is abolished outright. Founders who researched the visa before that date are frequently working from the old rule without realizing it changed. The reform overview post covers the full capital and structural shift; this post focuses narrowly on the employee limb, because it is the requirement most often misapplied in practice.
Who Counts as a Qualifying Full-Time Employee?
A qualifying employee is someone who already holds a status of residence with no restriction on the type of work they can perform in Japan. That list is closed: Japanese nationals, Special Permanent Residents, Permanent Residents, the spouse or child of a Japanese national, and Long-Term Residents. The employee must be genuinely full-time, meaning a real employment contract with substantive duties and hours, not a nominal appointment created to satisfy the filing. They must also be enrolled in Japan's employment insurance and social insurance systems, because that enrollment is the documentary proof examiners rely on.
Does Hiring a Foreign Engineer on a Work Visa Satisfy the Requirement?
No. A foreign national on a specialist work visa such as Engineer/Specialist in Humanities/International Services (技術・人文知識・国際業務) does not count toward the qualifying employee requirement, regardless of salary, seniority, or how central the role is to the business. This is the single most common misunderstanding founders bring into a Management Visa filing. Two other categories are assumed to qualify and also do not: intra-company transferees on the Intra-Company Transferee (企業内転勤) status, who are dispatched staff of a foreign group company rather than independent status-holders, and international students on a student visa, whose status carries work-scope restrictions by definition.
The underlying logic is that the reform is testing whether the business has a genuine, durable presence in Japan independent of the applicant's own status. A qualifying employee is someone whose right to work in Japan does not depend on this company's filing succeeding. A work-visa hire's own residence status is itself contingent on the employer, which is precisely the dependency the rule is designed to screen out.
Why This One Hire Often Also Satisfies the Language Requirement
The Management Visa also requires Japanese-language proficiency at JLPT N2 or CEFR B2 level, held by either the applicant or the qualifying employee. Because Japanese nationals, Permanent Residents, and Long-Term Residents are typically native or near-native Japanese speakers, the same hire that satisfies the employee limb frequently satisfies the language limb at the same time, without the applicant needing to test for N2 personally. This is a genuine sequencing efficiency, not a loophole: the two requirements were designed around the same person because both are proxies for the same underlying fact, a real local operation with a Japanese-speaking presence. Founders assembling their filing should treat the qualifying-employee search as also closing the language question, rather than running two separate searches for two separate people.
What Do Examiners Check at Renewal?
At the one-year renewal, examiners look for payroll records, social insurance contribution records, and tax filings showing the qualifying employee was continuously and genuinely employed, not hired shortly before filing and let go afterward. A qualifying employee who appears on a single payroll cycle immediately preceding the application, with no subsequent contribution history, reads as a filing artifact rather than a real hire. Examiners also cross-check the employee's status of residence against the eligible list at renewal, not only at initial filing, so a status change (for example a Long-Term Resident status expiring or not being renewed) can break compliance mid-cycle if it is not tracked. Structuring the hire, the payroll, and the certified business plan correctly from the outset, an area covered under Management Visa services, avoids discovering a gap at the renewal stage when it is far harder to fix.
The certified business plan itself, required from a Japan-licensed public accountant (公認会計士), tax accountant (税理士), or Small and Medium Enterprise Management Consultant (中小企業診断士), should also reflect the qualifying employee's role and cost in the financial projections. A plan that only budgets for the applicant's own salary while the filing claims a full-time qualifying employee is an internal inconsistency examiners are trained to catch. Detail on who is eligible to certify that plan is covered in a separate post.
Key points:
(a) Qualifying employee categories are closed: Japanese nationals, Special Permanent Residents, Permanent Residents, spouse or child of a Japanese national, and Long-Term Residents only, holding a status with no work-scope restriction.
(b) Work-visa holders, intra-company transferees, and student-visa holders never count, regardless of role or salary, because their own right to work in Japan is not independent of the employer.
(c) The employee must be full-time and enrolled in employment and social insurance from filing through renewal; a hire made only to satisfy the application, without continuous payroll and insurance history, fails at the renewal stage even if it passed at initial filing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a foreign co-founder's spouse count as the qualifying employee?
Yes, if the spouse holds a status of residence as the Spouse or Child of a Japanese national and is genuinely employed full-time with payroll and social insurance enrollment. The relationship to the applicant does not disqualify the hire; the status of residence and the substance of the employment are what examiners check. This is separate from the question of two foreign nationals each independently holding a Management Visa in the same company, which is covered in this guide on co-founder structures.
Does hiring two foreign employees on work visas satisfy the requirement instead of one qualifying employee?
No. The reform removed the pre-2025 alternative of two or more employees of any status; only the JPY 30 million capital plus one qualifying employee combination now applies, and the qualifying employee must come from the closed list of eligible statuses regardless of headcount. Adding more foreign work-visa hires does not substitute for the single qualifying hire.
If our qualifying employee resigns after the visa is approved, does the visa become invalid immediately?
Approval itself is not automatically revoked the moment the employee leaves, but the gap becomes a renewal problem and, in serious cases, a basis for questioning the ongoing legitimacy of the business's operation. Examiners at the one-year renewal review continuous payroll and social insurance history, so a resignation without a documented replacement hire before renewal is a material weakness in the file. Replacing the qualifying employee promptly, with the same category eligibility and a genuine full-time contract, is the standard remedial step.
Conclusion
The qualifying-employee requirement is narrow by design and does not extend to any hire that itself depends on this company's visa sponsorship. Founders should identify the intended hire's status of residence before treating the employee limb as satisfied, and should expect payroll and social insurance records to be scrutinized again at renewal, not only at initial filing.
This article is informational only and does not constitute legal, tax, or regulatory advice. Consult a qualified advisor before acting on the content. Last updated: August 2026.