Where Malaysia's Household Ringgit Actually Goes Each Month

At a glance

Every two years, DOSM sends interviewers into thousands of households and asks them to log, category by category, exactly where the money went. The result is the closest thing Malaysia has to an official household budget — not a survey of opinions about spending, but a tally of it.

Category	Share of spending	Monthly amount	2022 share
Housing, water, electricity, gas & other fuels	23.5%	RM1,307	23.2%
Restaurants & accommodation services	17.0%	RM948	rose from 2022
Food & beverages	15.7%	RM876	16.3%
Transport	11.0%	RM611	11.3%
Personal care & social protection	5.6%	RM313	not verified for 2022
Mean monthly household expenditure	100%	RM5,566	RM5,150

Reference year 2024. Source: DOSM, Household Expenditure Survey Report 2024, released 8 October 2025. The top four categories alone account for 67.2% of total household spending.

The four categories that dominate the budget

Four groups eat up two-thirds of the average household’s money, and the ranking tells its own story about how Malaysians live.

Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels is the biggest line item by a clear margin, at 23.5% (RM1,307) of monthly spending. This is the classic “shelter and utilities” bucket — rent or loan-linked housing costs, water and electricity bills, cooking gas and other household fuel.

Restaurants and accommodation services, at 17.0% (RM948), has overtaken food and beverages bought for the home, at 15.7% (RM876). Between the 2022 and 2024 surveys, the restaurant-and-accommodation share rose while the food-and-beverages share fell from 16.3% to 15.7% — DOSM’s own release attributes this to households eating out more.

Transport sits at 11.0% (RM611), a small decline from 11.3% in 2022.

The categories the headline table skips

DOSM classifies household expenditure into COICOP main groups — the “Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose”, a UN statistical standard — which is why the survey’s own tables run to more categories than clothing, health, transport and housing alone. Beyond the top four (plus personal care and social protection, at 5.6% / RM313), the remaining roughly one-third of an average budget is spread across groups such as clothing and footwear, furnishings and household equipment, health, communications, recreation and culture, education, alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and miscellaneous goods and services.

DOSM’s own published release does not break out an exact percentage for every one of those remaining groups in its headline summary, so this article does not attempt to assign numbers to them — check the full Household Expenditure Survey Report 2024 tables directly if a specific smaller category matters to you.

Common mistakes

• Treating RM5,566 as “what I should be spending.” It is a national mean across every income decile and every state — a household in Kuala Lumpur or Putrajaya and a household in a lower-cost state face very different real costs for the same categories.
• Assuming the category shares are fixed proportions of income. The survey measures expenditure, not income, and higher-income households spend differently in composition, not just in absolute amount.
• Quoting 2022 percentages as current. The 2024 survey is the latest official release (as of this writing); category shares moved measurably between the two rounds, most visibly in the restaurant-and-accommodation versus food-and-beverages split.

What’s next

• Read the inflation half of the picture: Malaysia’s Inflation Rate and What the CPI Actually Measures
• Meet the agency behind the survey: DOSM
• Consult the primary release directly at DOSM’s Household Expenditure Survey Report 2024 for the full category tables and state-level breakdowns.