Who counts as an eligible employer
Citizenship is the clearest line: a Malaysian citizen is the case every stage of the process, from the initial approval through FOMEMA to the final permit, is built to handle. That doesn't mean it's the only line. Permanent residents and expatriates holding a long-term pass can generally apply as well, and licensed agencies handle these cases regularly, but they sit on a track where the specific qualifying details aren't fixed in one public schedule the way the process stages themselves are.
That's a meaningful difference from most of what the application-stages guide lays out. The stages of hiring are documented and stable. The exact income floor, or whether a spouse's status matters, isn't something you can look up once and treat as settled, because it isn't uniformly published and it moves. Malaysia's published FDH eligibility criteria set the worker's own age at 21 to 45; no source documents a separate age requirement for the employer. Treat any number you hear from a forum, an old brochure or an agency's marketing page as a starting point to verify, not a figure to plan around.
- Malaysian citizens: the standard, best-documented route
- Permanent residents: generally eligible, criteria confirmed case by case
- Long-term-pass expatriates: generally eligible, criteria confirmed case by case
Why this page won't hand you a figure
It would be easy to print an income threshold here and make the page look more complete. It would also be wrong, because those specifics actually differ by source and change over time, and stating one as fact risks sending a PR or expatriate applicant into the process expecting a rule that no longer holds by the time they apply. The honest position, matching how the application-stages guide already treats the Immigration Department as the authority on current requirements, is to point you to that authority rather than guess on its behalf.
In practice this means a short conversation before you commit time to paperwork: ask the Immigration Department directly, or ask a licensed agency to check your specific profile against the current criteria, before you assume a PR or expatriate application will clear on the same terms as a citizen's.
Sabah and Sarawak run different systems, not different rules
Everything above describes Peninsular Malaysia. Sabah licenses employers under its own Section 118 framework through the eNORES portal, a system JTKSM and Immigration don't administer, and it comes with its own reporting deadlines and penalty scale, covered in the dedicated Sabah guide. Sarawak runs a separate system again, GENESIS-HAVEN, with its own employer-eligibility page published directly at genesis.sarawak.gov.my, covered in the dedicated Sarawak guide.
If you're hiring from Sabah or Sarawak, don't extend anything on this page to your situation. These aren't regional variations on the Peninsular process; they're their own licensing tracks administered by different state bodies, with their own eligibility questions to confirm directly through those channels.