Prices in Malaysia 🇲🇾

In Malaysia, mobile data costs $0.28, diesel costs $1.10 and healthy diet costs $1.48. That is 7 of the 16 everyday items in the game, priced in US dollars, in MYR, and as roughly how long someone on the average local wage works to buy one.

Malaysia is an oil and gas exporter that spends heavily on keeping fuel cheap. RON95 petrol is capped rather than priced, so the pump barely moves when crude does, and diesel carries its own managed rate. There is also no VAT here: the country replaced GST in 2018 with a narrower sales tax on goods at 10% and a service tax at 8%, so the tax wedge on an ordinary grocery basket is small by regional standards. Cheap energy plus a light consumption tax is why Malaysia sits low in the dollar rankings for a country of its income.

What things cost

Item	USD	Local	Work time
Big Mac	$3.39	13.75 MYR	53 min
Coca-Cola (330ml can)	no data
Cappuccino	no data
Milk (1 litre)	no data
Eggs (dozen)	no data
Apples (1 kg)	no data
Gasoline (1 litre)	no data
Diesel (1 litre)	$1.10	4.47 MYR	17 min
Electricity (100 kWh)	$5.40	22.1 MYR	85 min
Natural gas (100 kWh)	$2.90	11.9 MYR	46 min
Cigarettes (20-pack)	$3.84	17.7 MYR	60 min
Beer (330ml)	no data
Spirits (750ml bottle)	no data
Vape e-liquid (1 ml)	no data
Mobile data (1 GB)	$0.28	—	4 min
A day's healthy diet	$1.48	6.32 MYR	23 min

Most local-currency figures are printed as the source published them. The cappuccino, milk, egg, apple and petrol rows are converted from US dollars at recent exchange rates; the healthy-diet row is converted the other way. A dash means the source publishes dollars and nothing else. Work time divides the dollar price by an estimated average hourly wage, the roughest number on this page. See methodology.

How Malaysia compares

Relative to the rest of the game, Malaysia is most expensive for natural gas (100 kWh), where it ranks 27th out of 31 countries at $2.90, against a global median of $9.80.

It is relatively cheapest for electricity (100 kWh) at $5.40, which is 45th of 48, only 3 countries in the game are cheaper.

Measured against local earnings rather than dollars, the item that takes the longest to afford here is electricity (100 kWh), at roughly 85 minutes of the average wage. Dollar prices and work-time prices often rank countries very differently, and that gap is usually the more interesting number.

What the state takes

Standard rate in Malaysia: 10% sales tax on goods, 8% service tax. Where these come from.

Play a puzzle

Malaysia comes up in the daily puzzle roughly once every 49 days, paired with a different item each time. Play today's puzzle or browse the archive of past rounds.

Why a country's prices look the way they do

Malaysia prices: common questions

How much do everyday things cost in Malaysia?

Pricele publishes 7 everyday prices for Malaysia, each from a named source. Mobile data $0.28, Diesel $1.10, Healthy diet $1.48. All figures are converted to US dollars so countries can be compared directly; the local-currency figure is shown alongside wherever the source published one.

What currency is used in Malaysia?

Malaysia uses the MYR. Pricele lists every price in US dollars for comparability, and shows the published local-currency figure next to it where the source gives one rather than back-converting from the dollar price.

What is the cheapest thing on Pricele's Malaysia list?

Of the 7 items priced for Malaysia, the cheapest is Mobile data at $0.28 and the most expensive is Electricity (100 kWh) at $5.40. That is a comparison within one country's list, not a claim about value for money.

Where do Pricele's Malaysia prices come from?

Every row names its source and the date it was collected. They come from The Economist Big Mac Index, Jan 2026, GlobalPetrolPrices.com, 17-Aug-2026, GlobalPetrolPrices.com, December 2025, WHO Global Health Observatory, tobacco tax survey 2024 (most sold brand), Cable.co.uk worldwide mobile data pricing, 2023 and World Bank Food Prices for Nutrition, 2025 (converted at the World Bank official exchange rate). A pair only exists where there is a real sourced number: the table is deliberately sparse rather than padded with estimates, so a missing item usually means the item is not sold that way in Malaysia.