Planned Revisions of the Tankan
-- Introduction of a Wage Survey --
June 2, 2026
Research and Statistics Department
Bank of Japan
Overview
The Tankan (Short-Term Economic Survey of Enterprises in Japan) is a nationwide business survey conducted by the Bank of Japan, with the aim of providing an accurate picture of the business trends of enterprises in Japan, thereby contributing to the appropriate implementation of monetary policy. The Tankan survey includes various questions, such as those regarding business conditions, financial statements, and inflation. It is carried out on a quarterly basis and provides survey results in a timely manner. For every survey, the Tankan collects responses from enterprises over a survey period lasting approximately one month, and releases results on the day after the end of the survey period.
The Bank of Japan's basic policy for conducting the Tankan survey is, to the extent possible, to improve user convenience as well as to reduce the burden on survey respondents. To this end, in the past revisions, the Bank has added survey items deemed necessary to grasp actual economic conditions accurately in response to structural economic and financial changes, and it has also abolished items that draw relatively little attention from users and overlap with those of other statistics.
Based on the policy above, in this planned revision, the Bank intends to make changes to the Tankan survey in two respects. 1) Addition of new survey items related to wages, which are considered highly useful for analyzing economic and price conditions; 2) abolition of survey items deemed to have relatively limited user demand (judgment of inventory level of finished goods and merchandise and wholesalers' inventory level).
In September 2025, the Bank published a paper that explains the planned revisions to the Tankan and launched a public consultation to gather a wide range of views on the proposed changes. We are deeply grateful for the approximately 30 valuable comments received from a wide range of business groups, economists, and academics. Reflecting on these comments, the Bank will proceed with the implementation of the revisions presented in this paper. The Bank intends to implement these changes to the Tankan survey around the first half of 2027. Upon finalization, we will announce a more detailed schedule.
In this report, we provide a detailed explanation of the specifics of the revisions as follows.
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Inquiries
Business Survey Group, Research and Statistics Department
E-mail : post.rsd5@boj.or.jp