Where did the ¥100,000 go? Japan’s 2020 Special Cash Payment, by the data

Between the spring and summer of 2020, almost everyone living in Japan received ¥100,000. It was called the Special Cash Payment (tokubetsu teigaku kyūfukin), and about ¥12.67 trillion was paid out in all. So what did people do with it? Some say it mostly ended up in savings accounts; others say it kept households afloat.

This question can, to a fair degree, be answered with data. We read the studies that used bank-account and budgeting-app records, along with the government’s own analysis, to see how much was spent, when, and by which households. Then we separate what this experience tells us about basic income from what it does not.

How the ¥100,000 was paid

Everyone recorded in the Basic Resident Register on 27 April 2020 was eligible, foreign residents included, for ¥100,000 each. The person entitled to receive it was the head of the household the person belonged to. Heads of household either mailed back the form their municipality had sent them with their bank details, or applied online through Mynaportal, and the money was in principle paid into an account in the applicant’s own name. The programme was budgeted at ¥12,880.293 billion (¥12,734.414 billion in payments and ¥145.879 billion in administration), all of it paid by the national government.¹

The first plan was different. The government initially proposed ¥300,000 per household for households whose income had fallen sharply because of COVID-19; on 16 April 2020 it switched to ¥100,000 for every person.²

Payments began in May. By 26 June about ¥9.12 trillion (71.6%) had been paid, and by 31 July about ¥12.32 trillion. The final total was about ¥12.67 trillion, 99.7% of the amount municipalities had planned to pay: nearly everyone eligible was reached.³

When it arrived, though, depended a lot on where you lived. In Japan, bank accounts are not linked to resident records, so municipalities had to collect and check account numbers one by one.² Even within Tokyo, 85% of applicants in Nerima ward had been paid by 30 June, against 34.5% in Edogawa ward.⁴

Those delays turned out to be a gift to researchers. If, in the same week, some households have already been paid and others have not, comparing them separates the effect of the payment itself from the spread of the virus and the stay-at-home requests. All the studies below use this “natural experiment.”²⁴

How much was spent?

So Kubota, Koichiro Onishi and Yuta Toyama of Waseda University studied about 2.8 million accounts at Mizuho Bank. Spending jumped in the week the money arrived and stayed moderately higher for more than a month. Within six weeks, outflows from the accounts equalled 49% of the payment; counting only cash withdrawals, 31%. Because those outflows include transfers and direct debits, the authors present this as an upper bound on spending.⁴

Michiru Kaneda, So Kubota and Satoshi Tanaka used data from 232,589 users of the budgeting app Money Forward ME. Within six weeks, 16% of the payment was spent under their baseline definition: 6% counted narrowly and 27% counted broadly.²⁵

Takahiro Hattori and colleagues used the city-level figures of the government’s Family Income and Expenditure Survey and estimated that about 10% was spent in the month the payment arrived. Spending on things bought at home and in shops rose; spending on face-to-face services did not.⁶

In 2023 the Cabinet Office looked at data from another budgeting app, Moneytree, over 16 weeks from five weeks before to ten weeks after payment, and estimated that about 22% of the payment was spent. A check with the household survey’s individual records gave about 17% over roughly 16 weeks, broadly the same.⁷

OpinionThe numbers range from 6% to 49%. They depend on what counts as spending (whether withdrawn cash is assumed to be spent, whether transfers are included) and on how many weeks are measured. But they point the same way. In the weeks and months after the money arrived, studies that count spending narrowly found between a tenth and just under 30% spent, and even those that count every outflow found about half. The rest, at least, was not spent straight away.

This may not be a pandemic-only number. According to the Cabinet Office report, the 1999 regional promotion vouchers raised spending by about 32% of the amount given, and the 2009 fixed-sum benefit by about 33% in a survey, or about 25% from the month before receipt to two months after in an analysis of the household survey.⁷ Hattori and colleagues also write that their roughly 10% is no different from estimates made before the pandemic.⁶

Who spent it?

The clearest finding, in every study, is that households with little money at hand spent more of the payment. In the Money Forward data, households whose liquid assets were smaller than their monthly earnings (19% of users) responded strongly, especially in the week of payment.² In the Mizuho data, households short of liquid funds spent nearly 60% of the payment. What mattered was not total financial assets but the balance in ordinary deposit accounts: “wealthy hand-to-mouth” households, with shares or insurance but little in their ordinary accounts, also spent a lot.⁴

On income, the studies disagree. The Cabinet Office found that households in the bottom third by equivalised income (income adjusted for household size) spent about 32% of the payment, with no clear effect for the middle and top thirds.⁷ The Money Forward data also show a larger response in the quarter of households with the lowest earnings.² The Mizuho data, by contrast, show almost no difference by income; the difference there was for households whose income had fallen by more than half from the year before (54%).⁴

On age and household type, the Money Forward data give some clues. The older the household head, the bigger the response; people living alone responded less than other households, and married households more than single ones. Having children made little difference.² But budgeting-app users skew young and towards Tokyo, and include few women (partly, the authors suggest, because the payment went to household heads), so older households are hard to see in these data.²⁷

Where did the unspent money go?

Some surveys simply asked people. In June 2020 the NLI Research Institute asked 2,062 people aged 20 to 69 what they used it for (more than one answer allowed). “Covering living costs” came first at 53.7%, followed by “savings” at 26.1%, “domestic travel” at 10.1%, “buying home appliances” and “buying masks and other hygiene products” at 9.7% each, “eating out” at 9.0% and “children’s education” at 7.0%. Only 9.7% said they saved all of it. The survey did not ask about amounts, however, and the researcher, Naoko Kuga, notes that measured in yen, more may have stayed in savings.⁸

Why keep it? In the same survey, people who chose savings were more likely than average to worry about losing income or their job. Kuga reads this as saving on purpose out of anxiety rather than having nothing to spend on during the stay-at-home period.⁹ The Cabinet Office likewise says the part not spent right away probably built up as “excess savings,” helped by the restrictions on going out, and is expected to be drawn down later to support spending.⁷

OpinionIt is too early to say the money was wasted because it was saved. Covering living costs is itself spending. And ¥100,000 kept aside when no one could see what was coming was a kind of safety net for a household. Lifting the economy and supporting people’s lives have to be measured with different yardsticks. The Cabinet Office report itself says the programme did not necessarily have stimulating consumption as its direct aim.⁷

One-off ¥100,000 and basic income

The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) defines basic income as “a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement,” and lists five characteristics: periodic, cash, individual, universal and unconditional.¹⁰ It is the same yardstick we used in the essay on Thailand’s 10,000 baht. Let’s run the ¥100,000 through it one by one.

Universal? Nearly, yes. Everyone on the resident register was eligible, foreign residents included.

Unconditional? Yes. There was no means test and no work requirement.

Cash? Yes. It could be spent on anything.

Periodic? No. It was paid once.

Individual? Strictly speaking, no. The household head applied for the whole family, and the money went into the household head’s account.¹⁴ People who had fled domestic violence could, if they came forward, receive their own share and that of family members with them from the municipality they had fled to rather than the one where they were registered.¹¹

OpinionThree out of five met, two not. And for thinking about basic income, the one that matters is “periodic.” As the Cabinet Office report also explains, one idea in economics is that people spread a temporary windfall over the rest of their lives.⁷ With a one-off ¥100,000, putting it aside against an uncertain future is only natural. Money that is certain to arrive every month is something people can build their lives around. What the 2020 data measured was how people respond to money that arrives once, in the middle of a pandemic, not how they live with money that keeps arriving.

So the fact that much of the ¥100,000 was not spent right away is not evidence that a basic income would just be saved. Nor is the fact that the ¥100,000 helped many people get by evidence that a basic income would work. Both answer a different question.

A lump sum has its own strengths. GiveDirectly’s study in Kenya compares a group paid monthly for 12 years, a group paid monthly for two years and a group paid in one lump sum, and early results in 2023 found the lump-sum group did better on many economic measures.

Our timeline also has schemes that pay again and again. The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend has paid every year since 1982, and the Marshall Islands’ Enra has paid about $200 every quarter since November 2025. South Korea’s rural basic income pilot pays 150,000 won a month in local vouchers to citizens living in selected counties in 2026–2027 (BIEN says this form does not meet its definition).

¥100,000 once, or ¥30,000 a month

Compare the sizes, too. With the basic income calculator, paying ¥30,000 a month to everyone in Japan’s current population (about 122.81 million) comes to about ¥44.2 trillion a year, about 6.7% of GDP. The roughly ¥12.7 trillion paid in 2020 is about three and a half months of that.

Opinion¥30,000 a month is not enough to live on. Even so, ¥44 trillion a year is more than three times what was paid out once in 2020. The ¥100,000 showed that the state can build a way to pay everyone. Doing it every month, though, needs an entirely different debate about where the money comes from.

What the ¥100,000 left behind

OpinionThe 2020 payment was a big experience: the same amount of cash, with no conditions, to almost everyone living in Japan. And thanks to the uneven timing, we now know from data how much was spent and which households spent it. Households with little money at hand spend quickly; people in anxious times hold on to money; when bank accounts and resident records are not linked, payments take time to arrive. All of these are lessons for the next time something is paid out.

But it was not a basic income experiment. It was money paid once, into the household head’s account, in the middle of a pandemic. It does not answer the question of how people’s work and lives change when money is certain to arrive every month. For that we need to keep looking at schemes that pay again and again.

We would rather not remember the ¥100,000 as “wasted,” or as “a rehearsal for basic income,” but by its proper name: a one-off emergency payment to everyone. That alone was a big enough event.