Overtime Pay YoY

Overtime Pay YoY is the yearly % change in non-scheduled cash earnings, or paid overtime, per regular employee in Japan. The term covers staff hired indefinitely or for over 1 month, including full-time and part-time workers. The source is the Monthly Labour Survey, a national survey. It is run by the Employment, Wage and Labour Welfare Statistics Office of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.

It covers workplaces with 5 or more staff across 16 industries. It counts yen paid for extra, holiday and night work, not base pay, bonuses, hours or unpaid work. The rate is nominal and never adjusted for inflation. Arabic financial outlets name the parent National Survey release after real wages of workers in Japan.

The survey covers about 33,000 workplaces with 5 or more staff. The reference period is the survey month, and sampled workplaces report every month. The figure is average overtime yen per regular employee for that month.

Each reference month has two releases. The preliminary release comes early in the second month after the survey month. The final release comes late in that month. Both appear at 8:30 a.m. Japan time.

Preliminary values may be revised in the final when late forms arrive. Revised values are marked r. The release also covers hours, employment and wage indices.

Each January one-third of sites with 30 or more staff rotate, and one-third of 5-29 districts rotate each January and July. The January preliminary uses pre-rotation sites while the final uses post-rotation sites, and the gap is published. Seasonally adjusted values are revised each January, and worker weights reset at irregular benchmark updates. Forecast seasonal factors are set each January for month-on-month reading.

It is a single series with no fixed parts or weights. The publisher breaks it down for analysis only.

• General workers: overtime yen per full-time regular employee.
• Part-time workers: overtime yen per part-time regular employee.
• Industry detail: overtime yen by industry, such as manufacturing, construction, transport and medical care, where levels differ widely.
• Establishment size: separate cuts for workplaces with 5 or more staff and for those with 30 or more staff.

The June 2023 preliminary release, published August 8, 2023, illustrates two points at once. Overtime pay averaged ¥18,674, up 2.3% from 12 months earlier, while overtime hours held flat at 10.0 hours. General workers earned ¥26,094 in overtime, up 3.0%, but part-time workers earned ¥2,732, down 2.4%, so the headline hid a split.

1. Collect: Each sampled workplace reports monthly payroll totals and worker counts from wage ledgers.
2. Inflate: Each reply is scaled by its inverse sampling ratio to estimate totals for its industry and size group.
3. Ratio-estimate: Estimates are adjusted with independent worker counts, using worker-share weights, so larger groups carry more weight.
4. Average: Overall overtime pay per worker equals estimated overtime totals divided by estimated workers across all groups. As an illustration, ¥54.0bn across 3,000,000 workers gives ¥18,000.
5. Index: The monthly average is divided by the 2020 calendar-year average and multiplied by 100, with the 2020 average fixed at 100. As an illustration, ¥18,000 against a 2020 average of ¥17,500 gives 102.9.
6. Year-on-year rate: YoY equals the current index minus the index 12 months earlier, divided by that earlier index and multiplied by 100. It uses indices, not rounded yen levels. As an illustration, index 102.9 against 100.6 a year earlier gives +2.3%. The rate is nominal and not seasonally adjusted.