When to register the new address when moving into our new house
24 Oct 2025 | #housing | #japanWe are building our house in Tokyo, and as the construction is coming to an end, we had to decide when to update our address at the city hall.
Background
Everyone living in Japan is required by law to register their address at the local city hall within 14 days of moving. If moving within Japan, then first one needs to go their old city hall, register their intent of moving out, receive the moving out certificate, bring that to the new city hall and register the new address.
Moving out paperwork can be handled up to 2 weeks before the moving date. Moving in has to be done from the day of moving to within 2 weeks.
No proof is required for the address (e.g. no need to show the rental contract), but registering a fake address is against the law.
The registered date of the moving should be the actual date of the move (and the 2 week grace period should provide enough buffer to handle the paperwork).
According to the mortgage comparison site, mogecheck.jp the penalties are severe:
転出届・転入届・転居届の提出は、住民基本台帳法で定められている義務です。行政が提供する各種サービスの利用にも関わります。そのため期限内に届出を提出しなければ『5万円以下の過料』が科されるルールです。
また引っ越し前に新住所へ転入届や転居届を出すと、公務員に対する嘘の申し立てを行った違法行為とみなされます。届出が嘘だと判明すると『5年以下の懲役または50万円以下の罰金』が科される可能性があります。
Submitting a notification of moving out (転出届), moving in (転入届), or change of address within the same municipality (転居届) is an obligation stipulated by the Basic Resident Registration Act. It also affects your ability to use various administrative services. Therefore, if you fail to submit the notification within the required period, you may be subject to a civil fine of up to 50,000 yen.
In addition, if you submit a notification of moving in or change of address before actually moving, it is considered an illegal act — a false statement to a public official. If it is found that the notification was false, you may face imprisonment of up to 5 years or a fine of up to 500,000 yen.
(I’m not a lawyer, so can’t confirm if this is true or not.)
The issue
When moving from a rental to a rental, there is no issue: it is easy to follow the law and use the actual moving date as the official moving date.
However when buying a house, another system comes into play: the real estate registry (不動産登記簿上). This has the name and address of the owner of each parcel of land (and information about buildings and mortgages as well). So theoretically the process of buying a new home should go like this:
- Decide to buy a place, make the offer, get accepted, finalize the mortgage
- Go to the bank with the seller, sign the paperwork, start the mortgage. The judicial scrivener (either from the seller, the real estate agent, or the bank) handles the real estate registry changes (new owner and mortgage). The owner’s address is registered as their old address
- Move to the new home, update the address at the city hall
- Update the real estate registry to the new address
(When buying land and then building a house the steps are slightly more complex, but after the house is ready, there is still a step to go to the bank to finalize the house-part of the mortgage, and there is a judicial scrivener there to update the mortgage and building information on the registry.)
To help the new owner not have to worry about updating the real estate registry, many banks recommend to update the address at the city hall before the mortgage finalization. This way the judicial scrivener can use the new address for the real estate registry, and thus the buyer don’t need to do anything. (Essentially do step 3 before step 2 and skip step 4.)
This is technically illegal, as no seller allows to move-in before finalizing the mortgage, so the actual moving can’t happen before that. However it is very common to do it, e.g. the real estate site, Home’s says:
住所変更を行うタイミングとしては、住宅ローンの契約（金銭消費貸借契約）を結ぶタイミングが理想とされ、契約を行う前に住民票を移しておくのが理想的です。… ここで現住所に住民票があるまま契約すると、新居を登記する際に住所に変更が生じ、複数に渡り登記を行わなくてはいけなくなります。この際、登記手続きを司法書士に依頼すると、その報酬として1～2万円程度の費用が必要となります。
The ideal timing to change your registered address is when you sign the housing loan agreement (the money lending and borrowing contract). Ideally, you should move your residence registration (jūminhyō) before signing the contract. If you sign the contract while your resident record still shows your old address, then when you register ownership of your new home, the address will have changed — meaning you’ll need to go through multiple registration procedures. In that case, if you hire a judicial scrivener (司法書士) to handle the registrations, you’ll need to pay a fee of around 10,000 to 20,000 yen as compensation.
But they also note to ask your city hall if they are cool with this.
Meanwhile the above mentioned mogucheck.jp article strongly advises against updating your address before the move, stating the penalties and also saying that you might miss important mail from the government if you don’t actually live at the new address yet.
Other sites and people in this reddit thread all suggest that changing the address before signing the mortgage is very common practice, and never prosecuted. This makes sense: the government offices only care about having correct records, and a few days difference is not something they (usually) mind.
Our city hall
We called our city hall to ask their advice. They told us that legally it is not okay to update the address before the move, but people still often do it, and the city hall has no way of checking when we actually move, so… Essentially suggesting that we can go ahead with it, but it’s still in a legal gray zone (they used the gray zone expression, but I don’t actually think this is gray. The law is clear, this is illegal, however it is almost never prosecuted, so it is fine.)
Our decision
We decided to only update our address after we actually move. This was done to stay on the legal side of things, and also because we have other ongoing things with the nursery that work out better this way.
This does mean though that I will need to update the real estate registry after we move, and I will write a separate post about that.