What A Tokyo Trip Costs

The point of this table is not that Tokyo is cheap. It is that Tokyo publishes. You can plan a week's eating from company price lists before you leave, which is not true of Paris or New York.

The Four Prices Nobody Publishes

Now the honest half. A ramen bowl, a department-store lunch set, a beer in an izakaya and a coin locker are the four prices every Tokyo budget guide quotes, and not one of them is published by anybody with the authority to be quoted. Ramen shops are independent businesses with their own menus. Department stores price their restaurant floors tenant by tenant. Beer is set per venue. And the station coin lockers, which used to be listed in an English PDF on JR East's site, now return a dead link where that file used to be, so no operator we could reach in Q3 2026 prints a locker size and price.

What we can tell you is the shape. The chains above set the floor at roughly $3 (¥450 to ¥500) for a hot meal, and the Michelin Guide's Tokyo selection sets a useful ceiling marker at the other end: its Bib Gourmand list, the good-value tier, runs to 114 restaurants in this city, more than any other city in the world. In between sits every noodle counter, curry shop and set-lunch window you will actually eat in, and the reliable rule is that a lunch set anywhere with a plastic display case in the window costs about the same as the tempura soba above.

One genuine trap on the eating side: the tax you pay depends on where you eat it, not what it is. Buy the rice ball to take away and it carries the reduced 8 percent rate; eat it at the counter and it becomes dining out at 10 percent. Convenience stores will ask you which, and it is not a trick question.

Read this table before you build an itinerary, not after. Two paid attractions in a day is a normal ceiling here, and the free list is strong enough that three paid ones usually means you have double-booked yourself on views.

What The Free List Changes About A Day

Three things fall out of that list. The first is that the free view is not a consolation prize: the Metropolitan Government observatory is a genuine city panorama that charges nothing, and it is the single best value entry on this page. The second is that the price gap between a temple and a digital-art museum is a factor of infinity, so the shape of your day, not your appetite for sightseeing, sets your ticket spend. The third is the discount pattern: nearly every public venue here is free or heavily reduced for children and for over-65s or over-70s, and almost none of the private attractions are.

For the paid list, guided entry is often only a few dollars more than the ticket. Walking tours of the free sites start at $6.49 a head, a temple tour at Senso-ji runs to $12.99, and the teamLab Planets entry ticket is $24.67 against the venue's own $23.30 floor, which is a dollar and a bit for somebody else handling the timed slot. The full comparison of what each platform charges against the gate price lives on the tours hub.

A week of Tokyo sightseeing rarely spends more on trains than it does on two meals. The shortest Tokyo Metro or Toei ride is $1.15 (¥178) on an IC card and the longest band on either network tops out at $2.79 (¥430), so five rides in a day is about $6 to $10. Against that, the 24-hour Tokyo Subway Ticket sold to overseas visitors is $6.48 (¥1,000), the 48-hour is $9.72 (¥1,500) and the 72-hour is $12.96 (¥2,000), and the JR Tokunai Pass covering JR lines inside the 23 wards is $5.64 (¥870) for a day. Which of those wins depends on how many rides you actually make, and the pass arithmetic works it through rather than assuming a pass is automatically good value.

The airport legs are the two big transport numbers of the trip, and they differ by airport. From the near airport the monorail into the city is $3.37 (¥520), which is a rounding error on any budget; the Haneda page prices every option. From the far one, the cheapest useful rail fare is $8.04 (¥1,240) and the fastest train is $16.01 (¥2,470), with the Narita options compared in the same way. For a foreign passport, the visitor round-trip ticket at $33.70 (¥5,200) is the single biggest transport saving on offer in this city.

Two costs that catch people. An IC card is sold in fixed face values from ¥1,000 to ¥10,000 including a ¥500 deposit, and it is topped up with cash only at station machines, so a traveller who lands with no yen at all still needs one visit to an ATM. And refunding the card at the end costs a ¥220 handling fee against the ¥500 deposit returned, which means cashing out a nearly empty card is worth doing and cashing out a card with ¥300 on it is not.

The taxi is the one line with no published price. Tokyo's fixed airport fares are set out by the Hire-Taxi Association as zone charts published only as images, and no metered rate table survived our fetch of the association's own pages in Q3 2026, so we quote no figure for a ride across two wards. What the association does confirm is the structure: expressway tolls on top, a premium between 22:00 and 05:00, and a discount for holders of a disability certificate.

Google resolves a district to the ward that contains it, so read the area column as the ward rather than the tourist neighbourhood: the Asakusa query resolved to Sumida, the Akihabara query to Taito, and Odaiba to the whole of Minato. The middle half of listings, between the 25th and 75th percentiles, is the useful band.

The Tax, And The Version Coming In 2027

On top of the room comes the accommodation tax, and it is charged per person per night rather than per room. Under $64.80 (¥10,000) a night per person the tax is zero. From $64.80 to just under $97.20 (¥10,000 to ¥14,999) it is ¥100 a person a night. At $97.20 (¥15,000) and above it is ¥200. The hotel collects it, and on a typical week for two in a mid-range room that is a few hundred yen in total, which is to say nothing at all.

That changes on 1 April 2027. The Metropolitan Government's tax bureau has published the revision and the Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications approved it on 30 June 2026: the flat bands disappear and the tax becomes 3 percent of the accommodation charge, the exemption threshold rises to ¥13,000 a person a night, and the tax extends to simple lodgings such as hostels and guesthouses and to registered private rentals, which the current rules do not clearly cover. On a $150 room for two that is roughly $9 a night rather than the ¥400 it would be today, so if your trip falls after that date, price it in.

A word on where the money actually goes. Comparing the areas above with what each one is for is a different question from what a room costs, and it is the one that decides whether the extra fifty dollars in Shibuya buys anything. That comparison lives on the where-to-stay page, which sets each area against the walk, the last train and the noise.

Japan's consumption tax is 10 percent as standard, made up of a 7.8 percent national and a 2.2 percent local component, with a reduced 8 percent rate on food and non-alcoholic drink that is not dining out. Those are the National Tax Agency's own figures, unchanged since 2019, and they are the tax that tax-free shopping refunds.

Until 31 October 2026 the system works the way visitors expect: you show your passport at a registered tax-free counter, the shop exempts the tax at the till, and you walk out having paid the pre-tax price. From 1 November 2026 that becomes a refund method. You pay the full tax-inclusive price at the till; the shop files the purchase record to the National Tax Agency's tax-free management system; you obtain customs confirmation at departure, within 90 days of the purchase date, that the goods are leaving Japan; and the refund is paid to you after that confirmation. The practical consequence is that your budget needs to carry the tax through the trip instead of never paying it.

The reform is not all friction. It abolishes the split between general products and consumables, along with the ¥500,000 ceiling on tax-free consumables, the requirement to declare the purpose of use, and the sealed-packaging rule that used to stop you opening the cosmetics you bought. The ¥5,000 minimum purchase, excluding tax, stays and now applies to any category. Gold and platinum bullion and coins, and goods already exempt from consumption tax, are excluded from the scheme entirely.

One planning note. If your trip crosses that date, you will meet both systems in the same week, and the shops themselves are the ones adapting. Keep receipts either way, keep the goods accessible for the customs check at the airport, and do not count the refund as money you have until it lands.

Bring a card and bring cash. Japan's national tourism organisation puts it plainly on its own visitor pages: most stores and restaurants take Visa, Mastercard and American Express, but Japan is still very much a cash culture, and smaller shops and family businesses may take yen only. Ticket machines for IC cards take cash only. Shrine offerings, market stalls and the older end of the noodle-counter world take cash only. A day with no notes in your pocket is a day of small frustrations.

For the notes themselves, two networks reliably take a foreign card. Seven Bank's ATMs, in Seven-Eleven stores and in station and airport lobbies nationwide, accept Visa, Plus, American Express, Discover, JCB, Diners Club and China UnionPay, operate in twelve languages, and cap a single withdrawal at ¥100,000, or ¥30,000 for a magnetic-stripe card. Japan Post Bank's ATMs, which the tourism organisation counts at more than 26,000 locations, accept Cirrus, Plus, Maestro and Visa Electron as well as the main credit networks. Between them, a foreign card is never far away in central Tokyo.

One thing to decline at the screen. Seven Bank offers dynamic currency conversion, the option to be billed in your home currency instead of yen. It looks helpful and it is not: the exchange rate is set by the machine's operator rather than by your bank, and it is almost always worse. Choose yen, and let your own bank convert.

And then the easiest line in any Tokyo budget: there is no tipping. The national tourism organisation's own guidance states that it is not common to tip for services in bars, cafes, restaurants, taxis or hotels. The single soft exception is a discretionary envelope gift, kokorozuke, sometimes given to a private guide or interpreter used to international customs, and even that is optional and never expected. Leaving coins on a restaurant table here is not generous, it is confusing, and staff will chase you down the street to return them.