5th October 2026 - 4 min read
Small gold bars of 1g, 5g, or 10g have become a common way for people to put money aside a little at a time. Since 8 June 2026, though, anyone buying imported minted bars may have been paying for a 10% import duty included in the price. The Customs Duties (Amendment) Order 2026, P.U. (A) 350, cuts that duty from 10% to 0% from 1 November 2026.
The cut applies to minted (stamped) gold bars, the small bars people buy to save. The most common sizes are 1g to 50g. The duty only ever applied to imported bars, so bars minted in Malaysia were never taxed and their prices have no duty to lose. Bank Muamalat sells imported bars, and it told customers in May that these bars would cost more once the duty applied.
According to Tomei Consolidated group managing director Datuk Ng Yih Pyng, large cast bars, which weigh 1kg and up and are used by manufacturers, are classed differently and were already duty-free. Jewellery isn’t affected either.
So this matters to you if you buy imported minted bars, or if you convert gold in your account into an imported physical bar.
The duty is 10% of what a bar is worth when it arrives in Malaysia. So a bar worth RM100 costs the seller RM110 once the duty is added. When the duty is removed, RM110 drops back to RM100. That’s a saving of RM10 out of RM110, or about 9.1% off what the seller paid for the bar.
On 5 October, Bank Muamalat sold a gold bar at RM605.02 a gram and gold in its account at RM584.53 a gram, according to its own price board. If the account price has no duty in it, the RM20.49 difference is the most the duty could be adding to each gram of the bar.
The table below shows what that means for each bar size Bank Muamalat sells.
| Bar size | Bar price | Same weight in its account | Most the duty removal could take off |
| 5g | RM3,025.10 | RM2,922.65 | RM102.45 |
| 10g | RM6,050.20 | RM5,845.30 | RM204.90 |
| 20g | RM12,100.40 | RM11,690.60 | RM409.80 |
| 50g | RM30,251.00 | RM29,226.50 | RM1,024.50 |
| 100g | RM60,502.00 | RM58,453.00 | RM2,049.00 |
RinggitPlus worked out these amounts using Bank Muamalat’s bar and account prices on 5 October 2026. Prices will change with the gold price.
The real saving will be less than this, because part of the difference pays for making and packaging the bar, and that cost stays.
If you buy gold every month through a gold account or gold savings plan, you probably don’t need to change anything. The Malaysia Gold Association’s president, Datuk Seri Louis Ng, said in September that the duty applies to minted bars in finished, packaged form, and not to kilobars and cast bars. So gold held in an account may not be affected, but check with your bank.
If you’re planning to buy an imported minted bar in October, ask the seller two things. Did they pay the import duty on this bar, and will the price change after 1 November? Then work out how much more the bar costs than the seller’s gold account price, per gram. Do this now, and then again in the first week of November. If that difference shrinks, the duty removal has made the bar cheaper. If it doesn’t, any price drop is just the gold price moving.
Do note that some sellers have already paid the duty on bars they have in stock now. They may keep their prices the same until those bars are sold, so prices may not drop straight away on 1 November. The gold price also changes every day. If the gold price goes up in November, it could cancel out what you save from the duty removal.
Waiting makes the most sense if you were already planning to buy a 50g or 100g bar, and the seller confirms the duty is included in its price.
Gold doesn’t earn interest, and gold accounts aren’t protected by PIDM the way savings accounts are. If you’re looking at gold accounts, see how Maybank Islamic’s MIGA-i works.
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Christina writes about personal finance with an eye for making the complicated feel straightforward. She is drawn to the everyday money decisions people face and genuinely enjoys finding the clearest way to explain them. Between articles, she is probably napping, on a hiking trail, or terrorising her sister’s cats.
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