The cost of living in Kuching, against Sarawak and Kota Kinabalu

DOSM's 2024 figures for the Kuching district:

• Mean monthly household expenditure — RM5,184
• Mean monthly household income — RM8,237
• Median monthly household income — RM6,741
• Gini coefficient — 0.349
• Poverty rate — 7.7%

For Sarawak as a whole: expenditure RM4,281, mean income RM6,947, median RM5,504, Gini 0.361, poverty 8.4%.

The comparison that actually matters for a mover choosing between them is Kuching against Kota Kinabalu, Sabah's capital:

• Expenditure: Kuching RM5,184 · Kota Kinabalu RM4,726
• Median income: Kuching RM6,741 · Kota Kinabalu RM5,896
• Gini: Kuching 0.349 · Kota Kinabalu 0.426
• Poverty: Kuching 7.7% · Kota Kinabalu 12.0%

Kuching is the more expensive city and the markedly more equal one. Kota Kinabalu is cheaper on the average, but that average is stretched across a much wider distribution.

Source: Department of Statistics Malaysia — Household Income and Expenditure: Administrative Districts, read 3 October 2026

What this measures, before the numbers are useful. These are Malaysian households, surveyed by the national statistics office — not an expatriate budget. A foreign resident's spending diverges in four predictable places: rent in expatriate-favoured areas, international school fees, private rather than public healthcare, and imported food. It converges on everything else — transport, utilities, domestic groceries, local services. Read it as the shape of the local economy, not as your forecast.

Kuching's Gini of 0.349 sits close to the national middle and well below Kota Kinabalu's 0.426. In practice a lower Gini means the average describes more of the population, so a household-expenditure figure is a more reliable guide to what you will actually encounter.

It also shows in the gap between mean and median income. Kuching's mean sits 22% above its median — real, but modest beside Kota Kinabalu's 48%. Fewer very high incomes are pulling the Kuching average upward.

The state poverty rate of 8.4% is the counterweight, and it is a rural figure more than a city one: Kuching district records 7.7% against the state's 8.4%, so the interior carries the difference.

The household survey measures money. The thing that should shape a decision to live in Sarawak is not in it.

Sarawak is Malaysia's largest state and much of it is reachable more easily by river or air than by road. Kuching itself has hospitals, public and private. Interior districts can sit hours from a facility able to do more than stabilise a patient, which turns a routine medical problem into a transport problem.

Three consequences worth settling before you move:

• Evacuation cover is an optional add-on, not standard — up to US$100,000 for transfer between facilities, while air, sea and mountain rescue are always excluded. Those are different services.
• Malaria is graded by geography here. The UK's national travel health service puts the inland, forested areas of Sarawak at low risk and the rest, including the coast, at very low risk — so the risk follows weekends inland rather than your address.
• Japanese encephalitis names Sarawak specifically as Malaysia's highest-risk area, with a seasonal peak between October and December.

One figure worth carrying: in August 2026 Malaysia's consumer price index stood at 137.5 overall while the health division stood at 134.0 — medical prices have risen more slowly than the basket. That describes population-wide public price movement, not what a foreigner pays. Public treatment is charged at the Ministry of Health's foreigner rates — RM40 outpatient, RM120 specialist, RM100 emergency — before any ward or procedure charge, and private hospitals charge private rates.

The pattern across Malaysia holds here and is worth stating plainly: local costs scale with the local economy and insurance does not. A policy is priced on your age and your cover level, not your postcode. Moving from Kuala Lumpur to Kuching cuts the household benchmark by roughly RM3,000 a month and changes your premium by nothing at all.

What does change is the distance between you and a tertiary hospital — which is an argument for considering the evacuation add-on in Sarawak that does not apply in the Klang Valley.