JJapan Finance

Did I earn too much as a freelance student?

  • December 15, 2025

Did I earn too much as a freelance student?

Hi,

I'm coming with a situation that I haven''t seen before when I tried to look around this subreddit.

I am a graduate school student (started in sept 2024) and started working freelance for an american company in april 2025.

I really needed the money and the fact it was remote actually allowed me to focus on my studies and work at the same time.

Now, I have a few questions about that which actually make me stressed. Will there by any issues concerning my work with an oversea employer? (I have the 28 hour work authorization but didn't create a sole proprietorship cause at first I didn't think I would be earning much).

At the end of 2025 I started earning a lot (more than $5000 in november) because I was being very efficient at the work I was doing and I was not working more than 28 hours a week. (The work was paid by the task, not the hour)

If I also have a 3.90 GPA in graduate school and I have the proof that my working speed was enough for making this salary in less than 28 hours, is there going to be any red flags?

I do want to file for taxes as accurately as I can in february, but I'm scared that earning too much will actually be an issue (to be exact, I will have earned around $23,000)

Thanks for reading and I hope I can get some clarifications

by Simmart

4 comments

  1. I don’t think there’s any problems. I was working part time at an AI startup while at grad school.

    The pay was quite good, and I made roughly 500k JPY per month while easily staying under the 28 hours per week threshold. 

    Neither immigration nor my school had any issues with this. To be fair my professor was quite familiar with the founder of the startup. 

    As long as you’re not skipping classes or have an abysmal grade, you’ll be fine. 

    That being said, for remote freelance work, you technically need a separate permission from immigration. It is not included under the blanket 28 hrs/week permission that everyone can apply for

    Edit: Btw, immigration doesn’t get any information from the tax office directly. They wouldn’t find out how much you’re earning or if you’re working too much from the tax office. That only happens during visa renewal when they check your tax documents and find it suspicious and decide to dig further. Or someone complains about you. Either way keep records of how you’re billing your clients and how many hours are getting billed

  3. There is *potential* for immigration to look at your earnings and decide that you arent here as a student and revoke your SoR. 

    Its important to remember that the 28hours permission is permission to work to *supplement* the required costs for studying here. Its technically not meant for “working”. 

    Since youve earned about the equivalent of a yearly salary for a full time salaried worker, immigration could deem you as using the student SoR to stay in the country while working, instead of properly studying. 

    It will come down whether you can prove youve worked within the allocated time. 

    Another potential issue is, technically (its kind of a gray area), you shouldnt really be working for a foreign entity remotely while in Japan with that SoR as that opens up a whole pandoras box of potential issues. 

    All in all, you might be tempted to under report your income. Dont do that. 

    And if its any comfort, I dont think immigration will be too strict on your situation as they consider these kinds of cases on a case by case basis. 

  4. Shouldn’t be a big problem

    I was doing an internship for 7 months under 業務委託 contract in my grad school, 2 years ago. Monthly salary was 500k yen post tax.

    I really didn’t want to get into any trouble with the immigration so firstly I make it very clear on the contract that my weekly hours would be 28. I also kept a track of how many hours I worked each day for a week and have my manger signed off on that every week as evidence.

    I expected immigration (or tax department) would talk to me after I filed my 確定申告 but nothing happened. Could be lucky or they just didn’t care

Comments are closed.