In brief
Ask how rare A5 wagyu is and the English-language internet will tell you it is very rare indeed. The figures in circulation on retail sites run from 1–2% through 3% and 3–5% to under 10%. They cannot all be right, and none of the ones we found cite a source.
Japan publishes the answer every month. This page is the number, the series behind it, and the arithmetic, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
The Japan Meat Grading Association (JMGA) grades every carcass that passes through the system and publishes the results by breed and sex. For May 2026, for steer wagyu — the category most premium beef comes from:
Widen it to all graded wagyu, including cows and bulls, and the figure is 68.2% (25,999 of 38,123). Narrow it to the yield letter alone and 98.4% of steer wagyu earned an A.
One month could be an outlier, so here is every year JMGA publishes in spreadsheet form. The figure is the share of graded steer wagyu carcasses receiving A5, and the right-hand column is the number of head behind it.
| Year | A5 share | A5 carcasses | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1996 | 17.2% | 46,826 | |
| 1997 | 16.6% | 46,800 | |
| 1998 | 16.0% | 44,111 | |
| 1999 | 14.1% | 39,022 | |
| 2000 | 12.9% | 36,055 | |
| 2001 | 11.8% | 28,532 | |
| 2002 | 13.1% | 32,983 | |
| 2003 | 13.2% | 30,144 | |
| 2004 | 14.4% | 33,524 | |
| 2005 | 15.5% | 36,001 | |
| 2006 | 15.8% | 36,622 | |
| 2007 | 16.3% | 38,853 | |
| 2008 | 18.3% | 45,687 | |
| 2009 | 18.8% | 48,706 | |
| 2010 | 17.5% | 47,366 | |
| 2011 | 17.5% | 46,943 | |
| 2012 | 19.8% | 53,829 | |
| 2013 | 21.9% | 57,048 | |
| 2014 | 26.7% | 68,461 | |
| 2015 | 31.3% | 77,778 | |
| 2016 | 34.2% | 80,489 | |
| 2017 | 37.7% | 89,838 | |
| 2018 (JMGA revised) | 40.5% | 98,722 | |
| 2019 (JMGA revised) | 45.9% | 112,888 | |
| 2020 | 49.5% | 127,902 | |
| 2021 (JMGA revised) | 53.3% | 139,540 | |
| 2022 | 59.7% | 157,580 | |
| 2023 | 63.0% | 169,234 | |
| 2024 | 67.2% | 186,645 | |
| 2025 | 71.7% | 200,843 | |
| 2026 (May, monthly) | 76.6% | 15,237 |
Annual figures are calendar years (January–December). The 2026 row is the monthly figure for May 2026, the most recent available at the time of writing. Years marked “JMGA revised” are the corrected files JMGA itself issued in place of the originals.
The rise is real and it is recent. The share sat between 12% and 19% for the whole of the period from 1996 to 2011. It then climbed in almost every single year: past 20% in 2013, past 30% in 2015, past 50% in 2021, and to 71.7% in 2025. The most recent monthly figure is 76.6%.
It is not an artefact of fewer cattle. This is the objection worth taking seriously: if the national herd shrank and only the best animals were left, the share could rise without anything really changing. That is not what happened. The number of A5 steer carcasses went from 46,826 to 200,843 — more than four times as many animals earning the top grade, in absolute terms.
And the low point was 2001, not the distant past. Worth stating plainly, because it cuts against a tidier story: the share was higher in 1996 (17.2%) than in 2001 (11.8%). It fell through the late 1990s before it began to climb. We have not established why, and we are not going to guess in print. What the data supports is the shape from 2001 onward, which is unambiguous.
Everything above counts wagyu, because that is what the question is about. If you are choosing where to eat in Japan, you are choosing between wagyu and other wagyu — a Holstein carcass was never a candidate for A5, and folding it into the denominator only makes the top grade look scarcer than it is for the beef actually in front of you. On the wagyu basis the answer is 76.6% for steer, and 68.2% across all graded wagyu including cows and bulls.
Some English-language sources nonetheless write their figures against every animal graded in Japan, dairy and crossbred included. We think that is the wrong denominator for this question, but we would rather publish it than have you take our word for the choice. JMGA reports it in the same files, on the 合計 (total) row.
| Period | Steer wagyu | All graded carcasses |
|---|---|---|
| May 2026 (monthly) | 76.6% 15,237 / 19,891 | 39.6% 26,575 / 67,190 |
| 2025 (full year) | 71.7% 200,843 / 280,161 | 36.6% 342,771 / 936,561 |
On this wider basis the share was 6.8% in 1996, bottomed at 4.9% in 2003, and has risen almost every year since to 36.6% in 2025. The point worth holding on to: across thirty years, on the widest denominator Japan publishes, the figure is never 1–2%. The lowest it has ever been is roughly five percent, and that was more than twenty years ago.
One wording note, because it matters: this is the share of graded carcasses, not of every animal alive in Japan. Grading happens at slaughter, and the figures above are what passed through the system in that period.
We think the small percentages circulating in English are less dishonest than old. A claim written when the share was in the teens, repeated by the next writer, and repeated again, gradually stops being checked. The grading standard itself has not changed; the population being measured against it has.
What we can say is narrower and firmer: no published figure we found gives a source, and none of them match the grading authority’s own results for any year in either series above — not on the steer wagyu basis, not on the all-carcass basis, and not even in 1996. We are not interested in singling out individual sellers, which is why none are named here. The point is that the number is checkable, and almost nobody checks it.
It does not mean A5 beef is bad. A great deal of it is superb, and the grade is a genuine achievement of Japanese breeding — that is precisely why so much beef now reaches it.
What it means is that A5 has stopped working as a filter. When three carcasses in four clear the top grade, the label tells you where the floor is, not which animal is worth the money. It also cannot be used to compare two A5 steaks against each other, because the things that separate them — bloodline, the composition of the fat, how long the animal was fed — are not measured by the grade at all.
We take the grading formula apart in What Is A5 Wagyu? What the Grade Actually Measures, and the criteria we judge on instead are set out in The Standard.
Everything above comes from files anyone can download.
The underlying numbers are JMGA’s and are not ours to license — JMGA states that its numerical data and simple tables may be used freely provided the association is credited as the source. The compilation above, including the English presentation and the assembled series, may be reused with attribution to JAPAN’S BEST WAGYU. If you are writing about this, cite both.
Both series are available as files, 30 rows each, 1996–2025:
Each row carries the year, the A5 share, the head counts behind it, and the name of the JMGA file it was taken from, so any single row can be traced back to the original spreadsheet. The May 2026 figures are monthly results rather than annual ones and are not in the files; their source is listed below.
If you use them, cite as: Japan Meat Grading Association, grading results 1996–2025; series compiled by JAPAN’S BEST WAGYU. If it would help to see the source spreadsheets we worked from, ask us.
Where we’d actually send you to eat. Our committee dines unannounced, pays its own way, and takes no money from any restaurant. See the selection of Japan’s best wagyu and yakiniku restaurants.