Japan: Expanded flexible work provisions for parents

Employer Action Code: Act

Japan’s Parliament recently amended several laws, including the Childcare and Family Care Leave Act and the Development of the Next-Generation Children Act, to expand flexible work entitlements for working parents and to encourage the working population to have more children. The amendments aim to address Japan’s long-term trend of extreme societal aging and to promote gender equality.

Key details

From an employer’s perspective, the Act’s more noteworthy provisions (effective April 1, 2025) include:

• Working parents with children age three or older who are not yet in primary school (which normally starts at age 6) will be entitled to request flexible working conditions. Employers will have to offer at least two flexible work options (from a range of options defined by the act), such as teleworking or reduced working time. Employers will be required to inform staff of their entitlements and ask them if they want to use one of the available options. The same group of parents will also be exempt from overtime work (currently applicable only to parents with children under age 2).
• Preexisting provisions for parents of school-age children to take up to five days of unpaid leave to care for a child (10 days for parents with two or more children) will be expanded to allow employees to use the leave to attend school events or for other specific needs for children in up to the third year of primary school (currently applicable only for children not yet in primary school). Service requirements under labor-management agreements to take such leave (where established) will also
  be abolished.
• Companies with more than 300 employees will be required to publicly disclose the rate at which their staff take annual “childcare leave” (parental leave). Currently, the requirement applies to companies with 1,000 or more employees. Gender-based “general action plans” (mandatory for companies with more than 100 employees) must establish targets for take-up of leave.
• Employers will be required to actively inform new and expecting parents of their work/life balance-related flexible work and leave entitlements and to inform staff age 40 and older of their flexible work and leave entitlements to care for elderly parents. Employers will have to be able to demonstrate that they seriously consider flexible work requests when received.

Employer implications

Employers should review their flexible work and leave policies. While the amendments are intended to encourage work/life balance for employees with family obligations, substantial societal and cultural barriers in the workplace to such practices remain. The number of men taking childcare leave has steadily increased over the past decade, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, but in 2023 only around 30% of eligible men took childcare leave (versus 84% for women). That said, the percentage of men taking leave rose by 13 percentage points over 2022, due in part to changes made in 2022 to make it easier to take parental leave. The government has established a take-up rate of 50% for men in fiscal year 2025. Among companies surveyed by WTW, 64% have flexible work policies, while 62% have telework policies.