Malaysia, in the present tense
Monday, 12 October 2026
A beautifully designed, living portrait of Malaysia.
Public data, turned into stories people can understand — what is happening today, how it compares with normal, and what is changing underneath. Organised by life, not by agency.
Malaysia today
Live
Malaysia is warmer than normal today.
+0.7°C
the national mean against the 1991–2020 normal for this date — read live from fourteen reference points, one per state
Sabah is the hottest state today The full chapter reads today against everything the record holds.
Read the climate chapterTemperature anomaly
Today's signals
Every tile says what its number is
The country in numbers
Official latest · not live
People
34.4 million
Q1 2026 estimate
1970 → 2026
DOSM · Demographic Statistics Malaysia, Q1 2026 (May 2026)
Provisional, projected from Census 2020.
Economic growth
+5.2%
full year 2025
Real GDP level, Q1 2015 → Q2 2026
DOSM · Gross Domestic Product, Q4 2025 (Feb 2026)
Real GDP. Q1 2026 ran at +5.4% year on year.
Inflation
+2.0%
May 2026, year on year
Annual inflation, 1981 → 2026
DOSM · Consumer Price Index, May 2026 (Jun 2026)
Median household income
RM7,017
per month · 2024 survey
Survey medians, 1970 → 2024
DOSM · Household Income Survey 2024 (Oct 2025)
Gross income, citizen households. Urban RM8,139; rural RM4,588.
Unemployment
3.0%
May 2026
Jan 2010 → Aug 2026
DOSM · Labour Force Statistics, May 2026 (Jul 2026)
Visitor arrivals
42.2 million
full year 2025
Tourism Malaysia · Official announcement, Jan 2026
International visitors, including day-trippers — not overnight tourists only.
These are the latest official releases, shown with the period each one describes — an annual statistic is never dressed up as today's reading. Verified against the primary documents, July 2026.
Featured story
All stories →State spotlight
Rotates daily
Labuan
An island Federal Territory off the Sabah coast, run as an international financial centre.
People
100k
0.3% of Malaysia
Median income
RM7,383
above national · 2024
Did you know
The baseline itself moves every ten years.
When the WMO shifted normals from 1961–1990 to 1991–2020, the reference rose with the climate. A day that was “above normal” under the old baseline can be an ordinary day under the new one — without anything about the day changing.
World Meteorological Organization
ERA5 reaches back to 1940.
Eighty-five years of hourly weather, reconstructed from every observation the record holds — ships' logs, balloons, aircraft, satellites — and made physically consistent by a single model.
ECMWF / Copernicus Climate Change Service
El Niño is noise. The trend is the signal.
Individual years leap and dip with the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, which redistributes heat between the ocean and the air. Warming is the slope the leaps happen on, not any one of them.
NOAA; World Meteorological Organization