As Japan expands child-care and family-care support to counter its falling birth rate, unmarried and single employees are increasingly absorbing the resulting gaps at work. They are taking on more overtime to cover for colleagues on parental leave and are being sent on unwanted transfers to regional offices, emerging as a new source of workplace friction.
According to the Nikkei on the 7th, a 2024 survey by the private think tank Persol Research Institute found that employees who covered for colleagues caring for family members worked an average of 5.6 more overtime hours a month than other staff.
A total of 42.6% said they were dissatisfied with having to fill in for others. And 69.2% said their employers did not provide enough support to workers who absorbed the extra workload.
Critics say the expansion of child-care and family-care programs has concentrated the burden on a small number of employees. Japan's system of support for balancing work and child-rearing is growing quickly, with the share of men taking parental leave topping 50% for the first time in fiscal 2025.
But complaints are mounting in workplaces that employees without families find it comparatively harder to take time off and are more often asked to cover the duties of those on parental leave.
From Vacation Days to Regional Transfers, the Burden Falls on the Unmarried
A similar pattern shows up in transfers. In a survey by the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training, about 60% of companies said most of the women they transferred were unmarried.
In some cases, unmarried employees end up shouldering a financial burden from transfers they did not want.
An unmarried woman in her 40s working for a local government in western Japan said she had asked to stay in the region but was assigned to Tokyo. As a result, she is paying the mortgage on her apartment back home and rent in Tokyo at the same time.
Apart from colleagues who had married and settled in the Tokyo metropolitan area, everyone assigned to Tokyo was unmarried, she said, appealing for authorities to "fix the structure that concentrates the burden on particular people."
Unmarried employees also say they are at a disadvantage in using vacation days. An unmarried woman in her 50s living in Tokyo said, "Colleagues could take leave if they said they were going to Disneyland with their families," adding, "Unmarried people could not take leave when they wanted."
Behind these complaints is a shift in the makeup of Japanese households.
According to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare's Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions, single-person households rose to 35.4% in 2025 from 18.2% in 1986. Over the same period, households made up of a couple and their children fell to 24.3% from 41.4%.
Ways of living have changed sharply, but workplace rules and practices are still designed around households consisting of a married couple and children. As a result, employees without families are left out of the consideration organizations extend to others, or end up taking on extra work, critics say.
Companies Move to Compensate Those Who Fill In
Japanese companies are responding by compensating employees who absorb the workload left behind.
Daiwa Lease pays bonuses to colleagues who cover for workers on parental leave. SSP pays an allowance of 100,000 yen (about 860,000 won) to employees who fill in for others. Some companies have begun awarding extra points in performance reviews for taking on such duties.
Experts say support for households raising children needs to expand alongside rules that keep the resulting burden from being shifted onto other employees.
Miyako Kudo, who leads the Madane Project, which supports women without children, said single workers who feel aggrieved are not asking that support for child-rearing households be withdrawn. "It would make a big difference if programs and rewards were open to anyone, so that they could feel they are being looked after too," she said.
Expanding child-care and family-care support alone will not resolve workplace friction, observers say. Calls are growing to supplement the rules by broadening flexible work arrangements on the premise of diverse household types and lifestyles, and by offering meaningful compensation to employees who take on others' duties.
