📅 Last verified: June 2026. Figures marked † are time-sensitive — confirm with LHDN or a licensed professional before acting.
The brochure price didn’t change on 1 January. The bill did.
From the start of 2026, a foreigner buying a Malaysian home pays 8% stamp duty — flat, on the full price. That’s double the old rate. No announcement on the billboard, no line in the show-unit pitch. Just a five-figure cost increase that landed overnight on every foreign buyer in the country.
Here’s my read on what it actually does — and whether KLCC still stacks up once you add it back in.
What changed
Foreigner stamp duty on residential transfers went from roughly 4% to a flat 8%, effective 1 January 2026. † One detail that decides who pays it: the rate is triggered on the transfer date (MOT), not the date you signed the SPA. Sign in 2025, complete in 2026 — you pay 8%.
What it costs, in ringgit
Take a RM1.5m KLCC apartment:
| Buyer | Stamp duty on RM1.5m |
|---|---|
| Foreigner — from 2026 | RM120,000 (8% flat) |
| Foreigner — old rate | ~RM60,000 (≈4%) † |
| Malaysian citizen | ~RM44,000 (tiered) |
So a foreign buyer pays ~RM60,000 more than 18 months ago — and nearly three times what a local pays on the identical unit. That gap is the whole story.
Who it hits
- Foreigners buying residential property — directly.
- MM2H holders — yes. The visa gives you residency, not a local buyer’s tax treatment. You still pay the 8%.
- Permanent residents (PR) — not affected. PRs keep the citizen tiered scale.
If you’re MM2H and assumed the pass softened your buying costs, this is the line that corrects the assumption.
Now look at what a foreigner pays everywhere else
Here’s the part that reframes the whole conversation. 8% feels steep — until you price the same move in any other market worth buying into.
| Market | What a foreigner pays to get in (2026) † |
|---|---|
| Malaysia | 8% flat stamp duty |
| Singapore | 60% ABSD + up to 6% base duty → roughly 63–68% all-in |
| Australia | Base duty (~5%) + 7–9% foreign surcharge (9% in NSW) + 4%/year land-tax surcharge |
| UK (England) | Standard SDLT + 2% non-resident + 5% second-home → into the mid-teens % on an investment flat |
| Canada | Mostly banned to 2027; where allowed, 20–25% (35% in Toronto) |
Read that again. A foreigner buying a S$2m condo in Singapore — one causeway away from Johor — hands over more than S$1.2 million in duty before a single other fee. The same buyer in KL pays 8%.
Malaysia is one of the few open, freehold-friendly markets in the region that still lets a foreigner buy a city-centre home in their own name — no punitive surcharge, no outright ban. The 2026 increase didn’t change that. It moved Malaysia from remarkably cheap to still among the cheapest.
(The one market that went the other way: Hong Kong scrapped its foreign-buyer surcharges in 2024. † Worth knowing — and a different conversation entirely.)
And then there’s the property itself
The international gap is the macro case. The micro case is the unit you pick.
An extra 4 points stings more in absolute ringgit on a high-ticket buy (RM60k on RM1.5m), but as a share of total entry it’s a few percent — on a purchase whose real swing factors are still location, scarcity, and the price you negotiate going in. A well-bought unit in a tightly-held KLCC/TRX address absorbs 8% comfortably. An oversupplied one three stations out, where the duty eats an already-thin margin, does not.
The duty didn’t change which projects are worth owning. It raised the bar for buying a mediocre one. I won’t project a return — only this: the cost of buying badly just went up more than the cost of buying well.
→ Run your real all-in number on the stamp duty & RPGT calculator, and see the full cost stack in the Foreign Buyer guide.
Singapore charges a foreigner 60%. Malaysia charges 8%. The duty went up — the front door stayed open.
This is my commentary, not tax or investment advice, and carries no promise of returns. The 8% rate is current as of June 2026; foreign-buyer tax rates in other markets are also current as of June 2026 and change frequently. Confirm with LHDN or a licensed professional before acting.