Japan's mall operators get their 2026 rent benchmark, but the numbers stay behind a paywall
The Japan Council of Shopping Centers published the 2026 edition of its annual shopping-centre rent benchmark on October 23 -- the reference Japanese developers and tenants use to set and check mall rents by category, city size and building type -- though the detailed figures themselves are sold separately, not published free.
The Japan Council of Shopping Centers (JCSC), the trade body for Japan's mall developers and tenants, said it published "SC Rent and Common-Area Charges 2026" on October 23, the latest edition of an annual report on the monthly rent and common-area charges developers actually collected from tenants in 2025, broken down by merchandise, food-and-beverage and service categories, and cross-cut by location, city size, centre size and building type, according to the association.
JCSC's announcement describes the report's scope rather than printing its figures: it says the edition also carries a 2025 annual sales-growth and sales-per-tsubo supplement, rent-to-sales-ratio benchmarks for tenant management, and a survey of what expenses are bundled into all-inclusive rent -- but none of those numbers appear on the release page itself. The report costs 5,500 yen including tax, sold as a downloadable Excel and PDF file; JCSC members can read it, and back issues, free through a members-only page.
What the association did put on the public record is the structure itself: category, city size, centre size and building type are the axes the report uses to organise rent, whatever this year's actual figures turn out to say.