22nd September 2026 - 3 min read
The median monthly salary for Malaysian citizens in full-time paid jobs rose 5.3% to RM2,940 in 2025, from RM2,793 in 2024. The Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) published the results in its Salaries & Wages Survey Report 2025 [PDF]] on 21 September 2026. The survey covers 10.38 million salaried citizens, up 1.4% from 10.24 million a year earlier.
Half of those employees earned RM2,940 or less a month, while the mean salary rose 4.1% to RM3,803. Both measures include basic pay, allowances and overtime, and leave out bonuses.
Managers and professionals earned the most in 2025, while skilled agricultural workers, craft and related trades workers, and technicians got the biggest pay rises. Find your job group in the table and check whether your own rise kept up.
| Job Group | Median Salary (2025) | Change From 2024 |
| Managers | RM6,186 | +3.3% |
| Professionals | RM6,124 | +5.2% |
| Technicians and associate professionals | RM3,852 | +8.8% |
| Clerical support workers | RM2,693 | +5.6% |
| Craft and related trades workers | RM2,173 | +10.9% |
| Plant and machine-operators and assemblers | RM2,083 | +7.0% |
| Service and sales workers | RM2,035 | +4.5% |
| Skilled agricultural, forestry, livestock and fishery workers | RM1,992 | +13.1% |
| Elementary occupations | RM1,758 | +6.3% |
Source: DOSM
The skilled agricultural median rose 13.1% and the craft and trades median 10.9%, both well above the 5.3% national increase. Managers’ 3.3% was the smallest rise, though their RM6,186 median is still 3.5 times the RM1,758 in elementary occupations.
Median pay rose in all five main sectors in 2025. Mining and quarrying paid the most at RM4,604, ahead of services (RM3,043), manufacturing (RM2,663), construction (RM2,270) and agriculture (RM1,813).
Within services, education paid the highest median at RM5,990, followed by health and social work at RM4,976 and information and communication at RM4,723. Pay in information and communication, and in finance and insurance, both rose 11.6%.
Accommodation and food services paid a median of RM2,013. So did other service activities. Wholesale and retail trade paid RM2,063. Water supply and waste management was the only industry where median pay fell, from RM2,490 to RM2,466.
In 2025, spending RM2,940 bought about what RM2,184 did in 2010, once price increases since then are taken out. Pay rose 5.3% in 2025 while prices rose 1.4%, so the median worker could buy about 3.9% more than a year earlier.
DOSM calls this the real median salary, and it rose from RM2,103 in 2024 to RM2,184 in 2025. The real mean salary rose 2.7%, from RM2,750 to RM2,825.
When you negotiate a raise, use the rise your job group got in 2025 as your benchmark. That ranged from 3.3% for managers to 13.1% for skilled agricultural workers, and the national median rose 5.3%. Prices are rising a little faster this year, but every one of those rises is still above August’s 1.9% headline inflation, which works out to about RM56 a month on the RM2,940 median.
The survey doesn’t cover employers, own-account workers, unpaid family workers or casual workers, so if you work for yourself, your income isn’t reflected in these medians. Part-time employees aren’t included either, and their number rose 24.8% in a year, from 591,100 to 737,900.
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As a creative content writer, Eloise has covered finance, business, lifestyle topics, and even moonlights as a singer-songwriter outside of RinggitPlus. Her current interests are learning the best ways to optimise spending and credit card hacks to gain more airline miles.
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