Japan to Assist Municipalities to Realize Free Elementary School Lunches Nationwide

The Yomiuri Shimbun

15:01 JST, November 17, 2025

The government plans to expand financial assistance to municipalities that currently do not provide school lunches at their elementary schools, as it plans to implement free elementary school lunches nationwide next fiscal year.

Specifically, the financial assistance is to be used to help the municipalities secure and improve facilities to cook and distribute school lunches.

The government will earmark funding for the assistance in its fiscal 2025 supplementary budget.

With some elementary school not providing school lunches, the government making them free of charge would create a sense of unfairness, an issue it seeks to address through the financial assistance.

Discussions between the Liberal Democratic Party, the Japan Innovation Party and Komeito have been progressing on a system to practically realize free school lunches, and they aim to finalize a detailed system design by as early as the end of this month.

The government plans to limit the free school lunches to public elementary schools and is considering providing subsidies to municipal governments to cover budget shortages, if necessary.

The proposal envisages a subsidy of around ¥4,700 a month – the national average monthly cost for school lunch. There is a view that the school lunches should be made only “effectively” free of charge, with parents or guardians expected to pay any excess costs.