What's Inside
Overview
Our Salary Guide delivers up-to-date information on 2026 hiring trends, workplace insights, and the salaries you need to build a high-performing team.
SECTION I
Salaries by Geography
See up-to-date, year-over-year data for Tokyo, plus city multipliers to pinpoint pay in Osaka, Nagoya, and Fukuoka. Get Marketing Manager, Creative Director, UI/UX Designer, Service Designer, and Front End Developer salary benchmarks (and dozens of other in-demand roles) for your geographic area.
SECTION II
Salaries by Gender
Use our latest findings to conduct a thorough pay equity audit, combat the gender pay gap, and promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
SECTION III
Salaries by Emerging Roles
See salaries for emerging and in-demand roles, including AI Specialist, AI Consultant, Character Artist, Creative Technologist, and NLP Engineer.
AI changes everything
Creative and marketing jobs are still thriving and showing overall growth in 2026, with an emphasis on adaptability, multi-disciplinary collaboration, and leveraging new tools and technologies.
This year, AI has dominated headlines and changed the hiring landscape, so we’ve highlighted some of the most cutting-edge job functions across the industry. You can find salary data for these and other emerging AI roles in our guide.
AI Architect
AI Architects align AI strategy with business objectives. As technical experts, they oversee the entire lifecycle—from selecting the optimal technology stack to system architecture and integration—ensuring that AI solutions are tailored to a company’s specific requirements and environment.
As companies increasingly prioritize AI integration, the demand for AI Architects who can translate a strategic vision into scalable implementation is surging. The median annual salary for this role is ¥12,174,270.
Natural Language Processing Engineer
Among the various AI specialist roles, Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engineer is a key technical expert. They build systems that enable computers to understand, interpret, and process human language. The technology behind modern Generative AI is rooted in this field.
Due to the emergence of large language models (LLMs), the demand for NLP Engineers has surged, placing them among the highest-paying emerging roles.
Technical Artist
Technical Artist (TA) roles and responsibilities are rapidly evolving. Technical Artists not only bridge the gap between artists and programmers, they also now work at the intersection of creative intent and generative models.
As gaming and film studios move away from manual execution toward generative workflows, they need TAs to build the infrastructure that makes AI usable for artists.