Income Tax Calculator

How Malaysian income tax actually works

Malaysia taxes resident individuals on a progressive scale. The rate in the headline is your marginal rate — the rate on your last ringgit earned, not on everything you earn. Someone in the 19% band does not pay 19% of their salary; they pay 0% on the first RM5,000, 1% on the next slice, 3% on the slice after that, and so on up the ladder.

That distinction is where the fear of a raise pushing you into a higher band comes from. Crossing a threshold never reduces your take-home pay, because only the income above it is taxed at the new rate.

The number the scale is applied to is your chargeable income, not your salary. Chargeable income is gross annual income minus every relief you are entitled to claim. Reliefs are the whole game: two people on the same salary can pay very different amounts of tax purely because one of them claimed properly.

YA2025 resident tax bands

These are the bands this calculator applies. They are unchanged for YA2026.

The RM400 rebate is a cliff, not a slope

If your chargeable income is RM35,000 or below, you get an individual rebate of RM400 taken off the tax itself, not off your income. A spouse with no income adds another RM400.

At RM35,000 the rebate applies in full; at RM35,001 it disappears entirely. Around that line one extra ringgit of chargeable income can cost RM400, which makes a last-minute relief claim — a book, an SSPN deposit, a gym membership — unusually valuable if you are sitting just above it.

This calculator applies the rebate automatically once chargeable income lands at or under RM35,000.

Reliefs you can claim for YA2025

These are the reliefs this calculator lets you enter, with the maximum claimable. Keep receipts for seven years — LHDN can ask for them.

A worked example

Take someone earning RM72,000 a year, or RM6,000 a month. EPF at 11% takes RM7,920 off the top, which counts toward the RM7,000 EPF and life insurance cap.

Reliefs: RM9,000 individual, RM7,000 EPF and insurance (capped), RM2,500 lifestyle, RM350 SOCSO. That is RM18,850, leaving chargeable income of RM53,150.

Tax on that: nothing on the first RM5,000, RM150 on the band to RM20,000, RM450 on the band to RM35,000, RM900 on the band to RM50,000, and 11% on the remaining RM3,150 — RM346.50. Total RM1,846.50, with no rebate because chargeable income is above RM35,000.

That is an effective rate of about 3.5%, even though the marginal rate is 11%. Skipping the lifestyle relief alone would have cost this person roughly RM275 more.

PCB is not your final tax bill

PCB (Potongan Cukai Bulanan) is the monthly deduction your employer makes. It is computed from a schedule that assumes only the automatic reliefs, so it usually overshoots for anyone who claims more than the basics.

The overpayment is not lost — it comes back as a refund after you file. But it is an interest-free loan to the government for up to a year. If your reliefs are large and predictable, form TP1 lets you declare them to your employer so PCB is reduced at source instead of refunded later.

Filing deadlines

Employment income only, Form BE: e-Filing opens 1 March and closes 30 April. With business income, Form B: the deadline is 30 June. Filing is at mytax.hasil.gov.my, where first-time filers can also register for a tax file number.

Late filing carries a penalty on the tax due, and LHDN can raise an assessment on its own estimate if you do not file at all. Filing on time with a zero balance is always cheaper than not filing.

What this calculator does not cover

It computes resident individual tax on the standard scale. It does not handle non-resident flat-rate tax, business or partnership income, foreign-sourced income remittance rules, or the separate treatment of directors fees and share schemes.

It is an estimate for planning, not a filing. The assessment LHDN issues is the number that counts, and both rates and reliefs can change with each Budget.