Tourism Tax (TTx): Who Collects It and Who Pays

Check out of a Malaysian hotel and you may notice a small, flat line on the bill that has nothing to do with the room rate: RM10, once per night, per room. That is Tourism Tax — and whether you owe it comes down to a single question the front desk cannot waive: which passport are you holding?

What exactly is Tourism Tax?

Tourism Tax, or TTx, is a levy on accommodation, introduced by the Tourism Tax Act 2017 and administered by the Royal Malaysian Customs Department (RMCD) — the same agency that runs Sales and Service Tax. It borrows its key definitions from the Tourism Industry Act 1992: a “tourist” is a person on a visit, and “accommodation premises” is any building where rooms are let to tourists.

The design is deliberately blunt. Rather than a percentage of the room price, TTx is a flat RM10 per room, per night. The RMCD guide is explicit that the rate does not move with the tariff — a room let at RM500 a night and a room let at RM75 a night each attract exactly RM10. The charge is per room, so two rooms for three nights is 2 × 3 × RM10 = RM60, no matter how many people sleep in each room.

Who pays, and who walks away exempt?

This is where nationality does the work. Under the Tourism Tax (Exemption) Order 2017, two categories of guest pay nothing:

• Malaysian citizens
• Permanent residents of Malaysia who hold a MyPR card

Everyone else — foreign tourists, expatriates, business travellers on any passport — pays the RM10. In practice the split at the counter is simple: show a Malaysian IC or MyPR card and the line disappears; show a foreign passport and it stays.

The exemption is by person, not by property. A five-star resort in Langkawi and a budget inn in Ipoh apply the identical rule, because the flat rate and the exemption both attach to the guest, not the grade of hotel.

Which operators actually have to collect it?

Not every place you sleep is in the net. An operator only becomes liable to register once it lets out five accommodation rooms or more. The RMCD guide walks through the arithmetic across multiple premises:

Operator’s rooms let out	Liable to register?
3 rooms in one premise	No
4 rooms in one premise	No
5 rooms in one premise	Yes
6 rooms across two premises	Yes
8 rooms across premises	Yes

Beyond the room count, whole classes of operator are carved out. Under the Exemption Order, an operator does not register or collect TTx if it runs:

• A homestay under the Ministry of Tourism’s Pengalaman Homestay Malaysia programme
• A kampungstay under the Visit My Kampung programme
• Accommodation for students of registered higher-education institutions
• Premises run by a registered non-profit for charitable, religious or welfare purposes

Registered operators had to sign up before 1 September 2017; anyone crossing the five-room line after that has 30 days to register. Registration, returns and payment all run through the MyTTx portal at myttx.customs.gov.my, using form TTx-01 for operators.

What changed for Agoda, Booking.com and Airbnb?

The original 2017 regime assumed you paid the hotel and the hotel paid Customs. Online platforms broke that chain — the guest was paying a website in another country, and the hotel never touched the money. The Tourism Tax (Amendment) Act 2021 closed the gap by creating a new taxpayer: the Digital Platform Service Provider (DPSP).

For any booking made through a registered platform, the DPSP is the party liable to account for the RM10 to RMCD. Who physically collects it depends on who receives the payment:

• Paid to the platform → the DPSP charges and collects the RM10 at booking, and accounts for it to RMCD. Agoda, for example, adds it to the total you pay.
• Booked online but paid on arrival → the operator collects the RM10 at check-in and reimburses it to the platform, which still accounts for it to RMCD.

To avoid double taxation, tax is charged only once per booking — if the platform already took it, the hotel must not charge it again, provided the guest can show proof of payment. Platforms register separately on MyTTx using form TTx-01A as DPSPs. Digital-platform collection took effect on 1 January 2023 (with a three-month grace period to 31 March 2023, after which the DPSP became fully responsible from 1 April 2023 regardless of who takes the payment). A later transitional policy (TTx Policy No. 2/2023) extending DPSP liability ran to 31 December 2025, and has been superseded by RMCD’s Public Ruling No. 01/2025, effective 1 December 2025, which restates how operators and DPSPs account for the tax.

When and how is it remitted?

TTx is not remitted per stay — it is pooled and filed on a cycle. An operator is assigned a three-month (quarterly) taxable period and files a return on form TTx-03 no later than the last day of the month following the end of that period. Payment is due on the same deadline, and a return must be filed even for a period with zero collections.

Late payment carries a stacking penalty: 10% of the tax outstanding for each 30-day period it remains unpaid, accumulating up to a maximum of 30%. The guide’s worked example is stark — RM15,000 paid 76 days late incurs a RM4,500 penalty (30%). The tax may be small per night, but the compliance obligation on operators is not optional.

What’s next

If you are a traveller, budget an extra RM10 per room per night on a Malaysian stay unless you are a citizen or PR — and check your booking confirmation to see whether a platform like Agoda has already collected it, so you are not charged twice at the desk.

If you are an operator, confirm whether your room count puts you over the five-room registration line, register on MyTTx if it does, and align your TTx-03 filing with your taxable period. Because TTx sits alongside Service Tax on accommodation, it is worth reading our companion guides on SST and SST registration to see the full set of RMCD obligations a hotel carries. For the current legal position on platform collection, the primary reference is RMCD’s own General Guide and Public Ruling No. 01/2025 on MyTTx.