Malaysia's Population: The Citizen and Ethnic Categories DOSM Actually Publishes

DOSM does not publish a number called “Malaysians.” It publishes citizens and non-citizens as two separate counts, splits citizens into five named ethnic categories, and then splits one of those categories — “Other Bumiputera” — into separately reported Sabah and Sarawak groups, each with its own named sub-groups. The word “Bumiputera” itself never appears as a single row in DOSM’s underlying data tables; it is something you add up from two rows, Malay and Other Bumiputera, after the fact.

This article reports those rows exactly as the Department of Statistics Malaysia has published them, with the statistical definition of each category explained, and nothing editorialised.

The headline count

DOSM’s Current Population Estimates, Malaysia, 2025 (released 31 July 2025) put the national total at 34.2 million for 2025, up from 34.1 million in 2024. The Demographic Statistics Malaysia, First Quarter 2026 release (14 May 2026) carries the estimate forward to 34.4 million.

	2024	2025	Q1 2026
Total population	34.1 million	34.2 million	34.4 million
Annual growth rate	1.9%	0.5%	0.5%*
Citizens	30.7 million (90.0%)	30.9 million (90.1%)	90.1%†
Non-citizens	3.39 million (10.0%)	3.38 million (9.9%)	9.9%†

*The Q1 2026 rate is growth against the same quarter a year earlier (Q1 2025, which itself grew 0.9%), not against the previous quarter. †The Q1 2026 release reports the citizen/non-citizen split as a percentage only, unchanged from 2025.

“Citizen” and “non-citizen” here are statistical categories, not a legal ruling on any individual’s status — DOSM counts residents against these two labels the same way it counts them by sex or age group. The estimates themselves are not a headcount: DOSM derives them with the cohort-component method, taking the 2020 Population and Housing Census as the base and adjusting it for births, deaths and migration.

One pattern is visible directly in the published numbers: the sex ratio among citizens was 102 males per 100 females in 2025, while the non-citizen sex ratio was 228 males per 100 females — more than double. DOSM attributes the gap to the high number of male foreign workers in Malaysia.

The five ethnic categories DOSM publishes for citizens

DOSM’s population data (both the annual Current Population Estimates and the quarterly Demographic Statistics releases) classify the citizen population into five named categories: Malay, Other Bumiputera, Chinese, Indian and Others. The OpenDOSM data catalogue’s own field labels for this variable are bumi_malay, bumi_other, chinese, indian and other_citizen (with a separate other_noncitizen code for the non-citizen population) — confirming these are the actual underlying categories, not a media paraphrase of something more granular.

Ethnic category	2024 (of citizens)	2025 (of citizens)	Q1 2026 (of citizens)
Bumiputera (Malay + Other Bumiputera, combined)	70.3%	70.5%	~70.6%*
— Malay	not split in annual release	not split in annual release	58.3%
— Other Bumiputera	not split in annual release	not split in annual release	12.3%
Chinese	22.4%	22.2%	22.1%
Indian	6.5%	6.5%	6.5%
Others	0.8%	0.8%	not stated in the quarterly release

*The Q1 2026 combined figure is simple addition of the two published rows (58.3% + 12.3%); DOSM’s annual release reports the combined Bumiputera figure directly (70.5% for 2025) but its 2025 media statement does not itself break Bumiputera into Malay and Other Bumiputera — that split appears in the quarterly demographic releases and in the separate Bumiputera Statistics, 2025 publication, which recorded the Bumiputera population at 21.8 million in 2025, up 0.9 per cent on the year.

DOSM publishes these ethnic figures as percentages of the citizen population only — it does not publish a headcount for each ethnic category in either release cited here, so none is given above.

Two things worth being precise about:

• “Bumiputera” is always a sum, never a raw count. DOSM’s underlying data structure has no single field for it — every figure quoted for “Bumiputera” is Malay plus Other Bumiputera added together, whether DOSM does that addition in its own release text or a reader does it from the published rows.
• “Others” is a residual category, not a specific ethnicity — it captures citizens who do not fall into the four named groups, and held steady at 0.8 per cent of citizens in both 2024 and 2025.

What “Other Bumiputera” is made of

“Other Bumiputera” is not one population either. DOSM’s quarterly demographic releases state plainly that it “consists of Sabah Bumiputera, Sarawak Bumiputera and other Bumiputera Peninsular Malaysia” — three further sub-categories, two of which DOSM breaks down again by named group.

Sub-group of Other Bumiputera	Share of Other Bumiputera (Q1 2026)
Sabah Bumiputera	55.3%
Sarawak Bumiputera	32.3%
Other Bumiputera, Peninsular Malaysia	the remainder — DOSM names the category but publishes no share for it

Within Sabah Bumiputera and Sarawak Bumiputera, DOSM publishes named sub-groups:

Sabah Bumiputera (55.3% of Other Bumiputera):

• Kadazan/Dusun — 31.7%
• Bajau — 26.5%
• Murut — 5.1%
• Other Sabah Bumiputera groups — 36.7%

Sarawak Bumiputera (32.3% of Other Bumiputera):

• Iban — 59.1%
• Bidayuh — 17.1%
• Melanau — 10.6%
• Other Sarawak Bumiputera groups — 13.2%

These percentages are shares within Other Bumiputera, not shares of the total citizen population — Kadazan/Dusun at “31.7 per cent” means 31.7 per cent of the roughly 12.3-per-cent-of-citizens Other Bumiputera group, which itself sits inside the wider Bumiputera figure. The distinction matters for anyone doing arithmetic on these numbers: multiplying two percentages from different tables without checking which base they use is the single easiest way to misquote this dataset.

Age structure and where growth is coming from

The same 2025 release reports Malaysia’s population as ageing gradually rather than shifting ethnic composition quickly. Between 2024 and 2025:

• Population aged 0–14 (young age): fell from 22.2% to 21.6%
• Population aged 15–64 (working age): rose from 70.2% to 70.4%
• Population aged 65 and over (old age): rose from 7.6% to 8.0%
• Median age: rose from 30.9 to 31.3 years

DOSM classifies a state as “ageing” once its 65-and-over share passes 7 per cent. By its 2025 release, 12 states had crossed that line, with Perak highest at 10.3 per cent and Melaka, Pahang and W.P. Kuala Lumpur the most recent additions.

Common mistakes

Treating “Bumiputera” as a single reported figure. It is always Malay plus Other Bumiputera added together — DOSM’s own data schema has no field that returns a single “Bumiputera” number without that addition happening somewhere.

Quoting a sub-group percentage against the total population. “Iban make up 59.1 per cent” means 59.1 per cent of Sarawak Bumiputera, which is itself 32.3 per cent of Other Bumiputera, which is itself roughly 12.3 per cent of citizens — not 59.1 per cent of Malaysia’s population.

Conflating DOSM’s statistical ethnic categories with legal or policy definitions of Bumiputera status. DOSM’s categories exist to count population for demographic reporting. Definitions used for specific rules — for example equity or ownership requirements in particular business sectors — are a separate legal question with their own criteria, covered in the Bumiputera equity requirements article rather than here.

Reading “non-citizen” as a synonym for any single migration status. DOSM’s non-citizen count is a single statistical bucket covering the full non-citizen resident population as estimated by its cohort-component method; it does not itself break this down by visa category, work permit type or documentation status in the releases cited here.

What’s next

For the constitutional and historical background to how Sabah and Sarawak’s Bumiputera populations came to be counted as part of federal statistics in the first place, see the state profiles for Sabah and Sarawak, both of which entered the federation on terms set out in the Malaysia Agreement 1963.

For the national unifying document that sits alongside — not in place of — Malaysia’s ethnic statistics, see Rukun Negara.

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This article is classified as sensitive (race) under NegaraKu.md’s editorial policy. It is written to be strictly descriptive: it reports DOSM’s published population categories, definitions and figures without characterising, ranking or drawing conclusions about any group. All figures are drawn from the official DOSM sources listed in the frontmatter. It is held in draft pending human sign-off before publication.