Sold or scrapped your car? Tell city hall, or you'll keep paying road tax

Community tip · Practical, easy to miss

Someone in a community group mentioned they'd sold their car months earlier — and were still being billed for road tax on it. The reason was simple and very avoidable: nobody had told city hall's asset department that the car was gone.

車を手放したのに、まだ自動車税（軽自動車税）の請求が来る、という話をよく聞きます。原因は単純で、市役所の資産税課に「車がなくなった」と届け出ていないことです。

Why the tax keeps coming

Road tax in Japan (自動車税 for regular cars, 軽自動車税 for kei cars) is billed based on who's registered as the owner as of April 1st each year. Selling the car to a dealer, scrapping it, or handing it off informally doesn't automatically update that record with your local city hall — especially for kei cars, where the paperwork trail is easy to assume "someone else" handled.

What to actually do

• When you sell or scrap a car, confirm with the dealer or scrap company whether they filed the deregistration, and get something in writing (a receipt or transfer certificate) either way.
• If you're not sure it was filed, contact your city hall's asset/tax division directly and ask them to confirm the car is no longer registered to you.
• Do this promptly — the billing date is fixed to April 1st, so a car still on record on that date means a tax bill for the full year, even if you sold it in February.