If you stay in public junior high: what the ministry's cost survey shows

Many children in Japan move from public elementary school to a public junior high (公立中学校, kōritsu chūgakkō) with the children from the same primary school. Japan's Ministry of Education (文部科学省) does not, in this document, explain how a ward chooses that school. What it does publish is what families spent. The latest survey of children's learning costs (子供の学習費調査, kodomo no gakushūhi chōsa) covers fiscal 2023 (April 2023 to March 2024). The ministry corrected the figures and replaced the summary on 16 January 2026. The amounts below are the corrected ones. Each average is per child per year, and it includes children whose families paid nothing for that item.

What a year at public junior high cost

School costs (学校教育費, gakkō kyōiku hi) mean fees paid to the school, trips, uniforms, materials and commuting. They are not juku fees.

	Public junior high	Private junior high
School costs in the year	¥150,761	¥1,128,061
Juku fees, average across the three grades	¥230,385	¥168,058

Inside the public ¥150,761, the largest piece was commuting, ¥44,081 (29.2 percent). Then books, materials and practical supplies ¥34,341 (22.8 percent), club and other out-of-class activities ¥27,316 (18.1 percent), school trips ¥24,234 (16.1 percent), other payments to the school ¥14,121 (9.4 percent), and a small entrance-related line of ¥1,178. Private junior high's largest piece was tuition, ¥458,018 (40.6 percent of ¥1,128,061). The public breakdown does not print a tuition amount in that row.

The private column is the ministry's average for children already at a private junior high. Tokyo's own list of first-year fees at Tokyo private junior highs is a different statistic, published by the Tokyo government, and it is not this ¥1,128,061.

Juku does not stop if you skip the private exam

Juku fees (学習塾費) in the survey include the joining fee, monthly tuition, seasonal courses, materials, mocks taken at that juku, and travel to it. At public junior high they rise by the year:

Public junior-high grade	Juku fees, average per child
7 (第1学年)	¥133,647
8	¥213,759
9, the high-school exam year	¥341,220
All three grades	¥230,385

At private junior high the same three grades average ¥168,058, and grade 9 is ¥202,127. Across all children, the public junior-high juku average is higher. The survey says so directly: at junior high, juku spending is higher in the public column; at kindergarten, elementary and high school, it is higher in the private column. Among families who paid anything at all for juku, the average was about ¥349,000 a year for public junior high and about ¥328,000 for private junior high.

Staying in the public system through the whole survey, from age 3 to the end of high school, sums to ¥6,140,466 over 15 years if every stage is public. The three public junior-high years inside that sum are ¥1,626,133. The all-private path sums to ¥19,688,737, of which the three private junior-high years are ¥4,671,589. Those are simple sums of each year's total learning cost. They are not a quote for your ward.

Correspondence courses and tutors

The survey puts correspondence courses and private tutors in one line (通信教育・家庭教師費). It cannot tell you the tutor's share. The public junior-high average for that combined line is ¥21,248 a year, including the many children at zero. Among families who paid anything, the average was about ¥78,000. At every stage except private elementary, more than 60 percent of children were in the zero band for this line.

What to do now

• Ask your elementary school which junior high children from this school move on to, and ask the ward office to confirm the rule for your address. This survey does not print that rule.
• If you are budgeting a public junior high, use ¥150,761 as the survey's average school-cost year, and expect juku, if you use it, to weigh more in grade 9 (¥341,220 in the survey) than in grade 7.
• If you are comparing a private junior high, keep the ministry's ¥1,128,061 (a full year of school costs, averaged across children) separate from any first-year fee list a prefecture publishes.
• Spending more than the average does not decide a high-school result, and spending less is what most of the zero-fee children in the same table did.