The cost of living in Malaysia, from the official household survey

Most cost-of-living pages about Malaysia are built from crowd-sourced submissions. There is a better source, and it is free and public: the Department of Statistics Malaysia publishes household income, expenditure, inequality and poverty by state and by administrative district, from its Household Income & Expenditure Survey programme.

The survey is run at least twice in a rolling five-year period, and the figures below are DOSM's data as of 2024.

One thing to hold onto before any of these numbers are useful. This is what Malaysian households earn and spend, measured by the national statistics office. It is not an expatriate budget, and it is not a price list. A foreign resident's spending usually diverges in four predictable places — rent in expatriate-favoured areas, international school fees, private rather than public healthcare, and imported food and alcohol. Where it converges is everything else: transport, utilities, domestic groceries, local services.

We publish it anyway, and in preference to the crowd-sourced indices, because it is a probability sample run by a statistics office with a published methodology rather than a self-selected pile of submissions. Treat it as the floor of a real budget and the shape of a real economy, not as your forecast.

Source: Department of Statistics Malaysia — Household Income and Expenditure: States, read 2 October 2026

DOSM's 2024 figures, highest to lowest, in ringgit per month:

• W.P. Putrajaya — RM9,186
• W.P. Kuala Lumpur — RM8,178
• Selangor — RM7,266
• Melaka — RM6,212
• Johor — RM5,927
• Pulau Pinang — RM5,850
• Terengganu — RM5,219
• Negeri Sembilan — RM5,115
• W.P. Labuan — RM4,497
• Pahang — RM4,368
• Sarawak — RM4,281
• Perak — RM4,232
• Perlis — RM4,084
• Kedah — RM4,028
• Kelantan — RM3,825
• Sabah — RM3,547

Two readings matter for someone choosing where to live. The Klang Valley is a different economy from the rest of the country — Kuala Lumpur, Putrajaya and Selangor occupy the top three places and nothing else is close. And the east coast and Borneo sit at the bottom, which is a statement about local wages and local prices together rather than about either alone.

Expenditure without income is half a picture. DOSM's 2024 median monthly household income by state, top and bottom:

• W.P. Kuala Lumpur — RM10,802 (mean RM13,985)
• Selangor — RM10,726 (mean RM13,296)
• Johor — RM7,712 · Pulau Pinang — RM7,386
• Sarawak — RM5,504 · Sabah — RM4,890
• Kelantan — RM4,083 (mean RM5,265)

The gap between mean and median is the part worth noticing. In Kuala Lumpur the mean sits 29% above the median, which tells you a minority of very high incomes is pulling the average up — so the mean is a poor description of a typical household there.

DOSM also publishes a poverty rate, and it is the figure that most changes the picture of the country. Kuala Lumpur sits at 1.0% and Selangor at 0.9%. Sabah sits at 17.7%, with Kelantan at 11.5% and Sarawak at 8.4%. Malaysia's regional spread is wider than the headline national numbers suggest, and the places that are cheapest to live are cheapest for a reason.

One figure from the price index is worth knowing because it runs against the assumption most people arrive with. In August 2026 Malaysia's consumer price index stood at 137.5 overall, while the health division stood at 134.0. Medical costs have risen more slowly than the basket as a whole over the life of the index.

That is a statement about public price movement across the whole population, not about what a foreigner pays. Private hospital inflation is its own question, and a foreigner is charged under the Ministry of Health's published foreigner service rates — RM40 outpatient, RM120 specialist, RM100 emergency — before any ward or procedure charge.

The practical consequence of the regional spread is about access, not price. The states at the bottom of the expenditure table are also the states where the distance to a tertiary hospital is longest — Sabah and Sarawak in particular — and the cost that matters there is transport under medical supervision, not the consultation fee.

For a mover, the useful way to read the table is as a rent-and-groceries forecast with a hole in it. Everything DOSM measures scales with the local economy. Healthcare arranged privately does not: a policy is priced on your age and your cover, not on which state you settle in. Moving from Kuala Lumpur to Kelantan roughly halves the household-spending benchmark and changes the cost of cover by nothing at all.

Source: Department of Statistics Malaysia — Consumer Price Index by division, read 2 October 2026