Late rent on a Tokyo furnished apartment: what happens

Pay rent five days late on a ¥250,000 Tokyo apartment and the most the landlord can charge you for it is about ¥500. Nothing else happens on day five. The expensive part of late rent in Japan is not the fee. It is the clock that starts the morning after the due date, and the record that keeps running after you leave.

Here is what each of those costs, with the law behind it.

Start with the fee, because it is the part people worry about and the part that matters least.

Your lease is a consumer contract: a company on one side, a private person on the other. 消費者契約法 (shōhisha keiyaku-hō — the Consumer Contract Act), Article 9, caps what any consumer contract can charge for paying late. The cap is 14.6% a year on the unpaid amount, counted day by day from the day after the due date. Anything a contract charges above that is void. The English text is on the Japanese Law Translation site.

Run it on ¥250,000. 14.6% of ¥250,000 is ¥36,500 a year. Divide by 365 and you get ¥100 a day. Five days late is ¥500. Ten days is ¥1,000. Thirty days is ¥3,000.

Many leases set exactly 14.6%, because it is the most the law allows. If your contract names no rate at all, the Civil Code's default rate applies instead, and it is far lower. Either way, the fee on one late month is about 1% of that month's rent. Nobody loses an apartment over ¥3,000.

The clock is the thing. Read the termination clause in the national model lease, the 賃貸住宅標準契約書 (chintai jūtaku hyōjun keiyakusho — the Standard Residential Lease that MLIT, the land and transport ministry, publishes). Article 10 lets the landlord end the lease for unpaid rent once it has set a reasonable period to pay and that period has run out with nothing paid.

Notice what the clause does not say. It names no number of months. One missed payment, one written demand, one deadline is, on paper, enough.

What stops that on paper from happening in practice is the courts. Since a Supreme Court decision in July 1964 (最判昭和39年7月28日), a landlord who wants to end a lease for non-payment has to show more than a breach. The landlord has to show that the relationship of trust between the two sides is destroyed. Lawyers call this 信頼関係破壊の法理 (shinrai kankei hakai no hōri — the destruction-of-trust doctrine), and one law firm's newsletter walks through the cases.

The working line is three months. Courts tend to find trust destroyed at three months of unpaid rent, and landlords' lawyers time their lawsuits to it. It is a tendency, not a statute. A Tokyo District Court case in August 2007 upheld termination against a tenant who was habitually about two months behind, because the pattern itself was the breach. Paying a little each month while staying in arrears does not reset the count.

So the calendar looks like this. Month one: the fee and the reminders. Month two: a written demand with a deadline, which is the reasonable period the clause requires. Month three: notice of termination, then a lawsuit for 明渡し (akewatashi — handing the unit back). One Tokyo lawyer puts the typical span from first missed payment to filing at five to seven months, with a forced removal one to two months after judgment. Slow. Not optional.

In a modern Tokyo lease you rarely deal with the landlord about any of this. You deal with a 家賃債務保証会社 (yachin saimu hoshō gaisha — a rent guarantor company), the firm you paid a fee to at signing so that no Japanese relative had to co-sign. Guarantor companies on a 60-day stay explains how you ended up with one. That firm runs the collection, and its timeline is faster than any landlord's.

The first contact comes one to three business days after the due date, by phone or text; SUUMO's own guide to arrears gives the same window. Within a week or two you get letters. Around the end of the month, or early the next, the guarantor pays your rent to the landlord. That payment is called 代位弁済 (daii bensai — payment in your place, with the right to collect it back from you). It is the moment the case changes hands. The landlord is paid and has no complaint. You now owe the guarantor company, and a guarantor company collects for a living.

Two things the guarantor cannot do, since 12 December 2022. The Supreme Court ruled that day on one guarantor's standard contract (最判令和4年12月12日, case 令和3(受)987). One clause let the company cancel your lease itself, without any demand, once arrears reached three months' rent. Another let it treat the apartment as vacated when rent was two or more months late, the company could not reach you, and the utilities and mail looked unused. The court held both void under Article 10 of the Consumer Contract Act, and ordered the company to stop using them and destroy the printed forms. Its reasoning: ending a lease takes away the tenant's base of living, and a company that is not even a party to the lease cannot be handed that power without a demand. The consumer group that brought the case keeps the judgment on its site.

What a guarantor can still do is pay, pursue, and remember. If a person co-signed for you instead of a company, one more rule applies. Since 1 April 2020, Article 465-2 of the Civil Code makes a personal guarantee void unless the contract states a maximum amount, the 極度額 (kyokudogaku — the ceiling on what the guarantor can be made to pay). The model lease prints it in the header, and the Ministry of Justice leaflet on the change uses an apartment guarantor as its example. Your co-signer can never owe more than that number.

The record is the part that outlives the stay, and it changed shape this year.

Until this spring the guarantor industry ran a shared database. Member companies of 全国賃貸保証業協会 (Zenkoku Chintai Hoshō-gyō Kyōkai — the national rent guarantor association, LICC) registered every payment they made in a tenant's place, under that tenant's name, and checked the list when screening new applicants. That database stopped operating on 31 March 2026, and the association says it destroyed the data. A missed month at one member company no longer follows you to every other member.

What remains is narrower and, for some tenants, worse. Each guarantor keeps its own files and will decline you next time. And if your guarantor is one of the credit-card-affiliated companies, it reports to the credit bureaus. CIC, the main bureau for card issuers, keeps contract and payment records during the contract and for up to five years after it ends. A month the guarantor paid for you can sit next to your credit card history for five years, and Japanese card issuers read that file.

You can find out which kind you have. The guarantor's name is on the guarantee agreement you signed at move-in. If the company's name is also a credit card brand, assume it reports to the bureau.

None of the above quite describes a furnished mid-term stay, and the difference is the whole point.

The model lease already bills in advance: its header has a box for next month's rent, due by a set day of this month. Furnished operators go further. Most charge the month before it starts, by card or bank transfer, and some take the whole stay up front, which is why cancellation terms matter more than late fees in this segment. So on a 60-day or 90-day booking, "late" almost never means you chose not to pay. It means a charge failed: a foreign card declined a large yen transaction, or a transfer landed a day after the cut-off.

That changes who holds the clock. There is often no guarantor company, because the operator screened you itself. The three-month doctrine still protects a residential lease, fixed-term ones included. But the operator's contract sets its own grace period after a failed charge, usually days rather than months, and Article 6 of the model lease blocks the obvious workaround: you cannot ask to have the deposit count as rent while you are still living there. Read the payment clause for two numbers before anything goes wrong: how many days you get after a failed charge, and what the operator says it does on the day after that.

Then act on how the mechanism works. The mechanism is a demand and a deadline, so a message sent before the due date, naming the date the money lands and how, is worth more than any apology after it. Part payment counts, because courts and operators both look at what you did, not what you meant. Nothing paid and no reply is exactly what the 2022 clauses were written to catch. Keep the written trail, since the cost of losing this argument is the apartment, not the fee.

If the money lands within the month, late rent costs you ¥100 a day and one message sent early. If it does not, the fee is the only cheap part. The clock and the record are what you are actually paying.