Sri Lanka to Japan Work Visa Route Checker — TITP, SSW, ESI

This is rule evaluation followed by addition. Nothing is scored, weighted or estimated: each requirement is a published rule, each rule is checked against what you entered, and the exam fees are the ones the operators actually print.

Step 1 — the age gates.SLBFE sets a minimum age of 18 for TITP, and Japan's Immigration Services Agency requires SSW applicants to be 18 on application. Neither programme publishes an upper limit, so this page does not invent one. Individual employer recruitment drives do advertise narrower age bands, along with height, weight and tattoo conditions — those belong to one employer's campaign, not to the programme, and treating them as rules would wrongly tell a 32-year-old he is ineligible.

Step 2 — the language rule, which differs by route and by field. For SSW the general rule is JFT-Basic orJLPT N4; either satisfies it and JLPT N5 does not. SLBFE carves out one exception: taxi and bus drivers are required JLPT N3, and a JFT-Basic pass does not substitute. Nursing care adds a separate nursing-care Japanese test on top of the general rule. For TITP the wording is different again — N5 is “preferable”, which is a recommendation, so this page reports it without failing anyone on it; but “for nursing care, passing JLPT N4 is required” is a hard gate, and is treated as one.

Step 3 — the skills test and the TITP (ii) exemption.SSW needs a pass in your field's skills proficiency test. SLBFE states that TITP (ii) completers do not have to pass these tests — but that someone moving to a different field “need[s] to pass a skills proficiency test in the field in which you wish to work”. So a different-field completion waives the language rule and reinstates the skills test, and only the skills test. That asymmetry is the single most misunderstood sentence on the SLBFE portal, and it is worth a few hundred thousand rupees to get right.

Step 4 — the ESI route, which turns on paper rather than exams. Japan's landing-permission criteria accept a university degree in a subject related to the work, a Japanese senmon-gakko course in that subject, or ten years of practical experience. Work grounded in foreign culture — translation, interpreting, language instruction, PR, overseas trade, design — has its own limb needing three years of relevant experience, waived for a graduate doing translation, interpreting or language teaching. Both limbs also require pay at least equal to a Japanese national's. There is no statutory exam, so nothing on the ESI card is a pass mark.

Step 5 — the money. Fees are added, never modelled. SLBFE publishes Rs 7,000 for JLPT N5 and N4 and Rs 12,000 for JFT-Basic, both marked subject to change, and a skills-test range of Rs 2,000 to Rs 15,500“depending on the field”. Prometric publishes exact Sri Lanka prices for 5 of those fields, and — this is the reconciliation that lets this page show exact figures without contradicting SLBFE — the lowest and highest of them are Rs 2,000 and Rs 15,500: precisely SLBFE's band endpoints. Where no operator publishes an LKR figure the row shows the band and says it is a band. Where none exists at all, such as JLPT N3, the row says “not published” rather than guessing.

Step 6 — cheapest versus fastest. Where JLPT N4 and JFT-Basic are interchangeable, the two totals differ by Rs 5,000 — and by up to six months, because JLPT sits on the first Sunday of July and of December with registration opening mid-March and mid-August for two weeks, while JFT-Basic runs several times a month. When your language gate is already met, exempt, or has no alternative, the tool says the two paths are the same rather than dressing up a choice that does not exist.

The 9 SSW categories whose skills test is held in Sri Lanka as of April 2026, with the fee each operator publishes for Sri Lanka. A band means no operator publishes an LKR figure for that field.

Exact figures: Prometric's per-country exam fee list, Sri Lanka section. Bands: SLBFE's own published range. Both checked 2026-09-27. SLBFE marks its figures “subject to change”.

SLBFE writes that tests for nine categories are available in Sri Lanka and then names eight. The ninth is food service industry, and this page does not guess it: SLBFE's own “More Information” link names food service among the fields whose Sri Lanka test details sit on Prometric, and Prometric both publishes a Sri Lanka price for that test and lists Sri Lanka among its host countries. A country price and a country listing only exist for a test actually sat there.

• SLBFE — Japan Recruitment Programme portal (route requirements, conditions, exam fees, the Sri Lanka category list, the warning points)
• Prometric — Examination fees by country, Sri Lanka section (per-field skills-test fees in LKR)
• Prometric — Specified Skilled Worker test list (host countries and test languages per exam)
• Ministry of Justice / Immigration Services Agency of Japan — landing-permission criteria for Engineer / Specialist in Humanities / International Services (PDF)
• Immigration Services Agency of Japan — residence status page for ESI (periods of stay)
• Japanese Language Education Association (JLEA) — JLPT in Sri Lanka: test dates, registration windows and per-level seat caps
• SLBFE — searchable directory of licensed foreign employment agencies for Japan
• Immigration Services Agency of Japan — Specified Skilled Worker portal (the Japan-side rule set)

Every rule and figure on this page was fetched and reconciled against these sources on 2026-09-27. SLBFE marks its own fees “subject to change” and dates its category list April 2026, so this dataset is re-checked quarterly and the page says so above once it is due. For Japan's own rules — the full 19-field SSW list, SSW(ii), the family and stay rules — see the Japan SSW eligibility checker.