Japan asked all 1,788 prefectural and municipal governments to move the core systems behind 20 resident services onto national standard specifications by March 31, 2026, the end of fiscal 2025. By that date, 70.9% of the 34,366 systems in scope had moved, and 10,013 were carried over with roughly five more years to finish. The program is now about running costs, vendor capacity and a legal review, and that matters to cloud providers, IT vendors and any business that checks Japanese identity documents.

Key points

  • 24,353 of 34,366 systems moved by March 31, 2026. The other 10,013, held by 1,015 local governments (56.8% of all), became "specified migration support systems." There are no penalties for missing the target.
  • Government Cloud has five approved services: AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and, since March 27, 2026, Sakura Internet's Sakura Cloud, the only Japanese provider on the list.
  • The Digital Agency estimates that running costs for migrated systems will rise from about 140 billion yen to about 250 billion yen, about 1.8 times the old level. The official goal is still a 30% cut.
  • The national government is now subsidizing part of the increase, reviewing vendor quotes line by line and starting the five-year review of the law.

Why a domestic IT program reaches global companies

Japan's local governments run resident registration, local taxes, national health insurance, pensions, child allowances and welfare for everyone who lives in the country. A 2021 law requires the systems for these 20 operations to meet national standards. The national government also wants them to run on Government Cloud, a shared cloud environment that the Digital Agency procures and provides to central and local governments.

Global companies meet this program in three places. Four of the five Government Cloud services are run by US companies, so procurement rules, such as a new option to fix the annual exchange rate on foreign currency bills, shape their public sector business in Japan. IT vendors and system integrators that serve municipalities, including Japanese subsidiaries of global firms, face years of carried-over migrations and close review of their quotes. And a new standard character set can change how some people's names are printed on official certificates, which affects banks, landlords and HR teams that check identity documents.

The legal duties fall on local governments. Private companies have no direct obligation, and residents in principle have nothing to do.