There is provided an article position management system which can determine where an article is present with high accuracy and manage the position of the article such that no article is left unchecked. Illumination sections (11-14) optically transmit pieces of positional information only to specific regions (lighting ranges (401-404)). A terminal device (31) receives the pieces of positional information transmitted from the illumination sections (11-14) and reads out article IDs from RFID tags (201-206) put on articles (101-106). The terminal device (31) sends the pieces of positional information and article IDs to a server (51) through a wireless LAN base station (41). The server (51) stores the pieces of positional information and article IDs sent from the terminal device (31) such that the pieces of positional information and article IDs are associated with each other.