Here’s the twist most guides skip: if you’re working in Kuching, the Employment Act 1955 isn’t actually your law. Sarawak runs on its own statute, the Sarawak Labour Ordinance (Cap. 76), administered by the Sarawak Labour Department, not the peninsular Employment Act at all.
That split surprises a lot of people, including HR managers relocating staff from KL who assume the rulebook travels with the employee. It mostly doesn’t. Sarawak (and Sabah, which has its own ordinance too) sits outside the Employment Act’s jurisdiction entirely; Peninsular Malaysia is governed by a different statute administered by a different department. The good news is that recent amendments have pulled the two systems closer together on paper, so a lot of the entitlements now line up. The bad news is that the two-track system is real, it’s confusing, and it catches out exactly the kind of employer who’s moving someone from Petaling Jaya to Padungan. If you’re checking your rights as a worker in Kuching, or hiring your first employee here, that distinction is where you need to start, not an afterthought buried in paragraph nine.
Key Takeaways
- Sarawak is not covered by the Employment Act 1955. Employment here falls under the Sarawak Labour Ordinance (Cap. 76), enforced by the Sarawak Labour Department, a separate statute from Peninsular Malaysia’s law.
- Sabah has its own separate ordinance too, so Malaysia effectively runs three parallel labour law regimes across one country.
- Amendments that took effect from 1 January 2023 harmonised many core entitlements (leave, hours, maternity) across the country, but the underlying legal instrument in Sarawak is still the Ordinance, not the Act.
- Core entitlements now largely line up nationwide: a 45-hour maximum work week, extended maternity leave, and new paternity leave for the first time.
- If your employer is underpaying overtime, denying leave, or terminating you without cause, the complaint route in Kuching runs through the Sarawak Labour Department, not the Peninsular Malaysia labour office (JTKSM).
- Enforcement and public awareness of the Sarawak/Peninsular split lag behind the written law itself, and that gap causes real problems for employers moving staff between regions.
Who Actually Falls Under the Employment Act (and Who’s Under the Ordinance Instead)?
If you’re employed in Peninsular Malaysia, you’re covered by the Employment Act 1955, administered by the Ministry of Human Resources through JTKSM (Jabatan Tenaga Kerja Semenanjung Malaysia, the Peninsular Labour Department). If you’re employed in Kuching, or anywhere else in Sarawak, you’re covered instead by the Sarawak Labour Ordinance (Cap. 76), administered by the Sarawak Labour Department. Sabah runs its own Labour Ordinance again, with its own department.
This isn’t a technicality. It’s three separate legal instruments, each with its own definitions, its own coverage thresholds, and its own enforcement body, applying to three geographic zones of the same country. A worker in KL and a worker in Kuching can hold functionally identical jobs and still be sitting under different laws, answerable to different government departments, if something goes wrong.
Within each statute, coverage generally follows wage and job type rather than nationality. Manual labourers are covered regardless of pay. Non-manual employees are covered up to a monthly wage threshold of RM4,000, the same ceiling Peninsular Malaysia uses, which Sarawak matched when it amended its Ordinance in 2025. Above that threshold, some protections (like overtime pay) stop applying even though others (like annual leave) still do. Domestic workers, and a handful of other categories, are typically carved out or handled under separate provisions in both systems. If you’re not sure which bracket you fall into, that’s a five-minute question for the Sarawak Labour Department rather than something worth guessing at.
What Did the 2022 Amendments Actually Change?
The Employment (Amendment) Act 2022 took effect on 1 January 2023 and reshaped several entitlements at the federal level, in Peninsular Malaysia specifically. Sarawak, running on its own Ordinance, needed its own parallel amendment to bring the state’s entitlements into line. That came later, through the Labour Ordinance of Sarawak (Amendment) Act 2025, which took effect on 1 May 2025, roughly two and a half years after the peninsular changes. The practical result most people encounter today is a set of leave and hours entitlements that look close to identical whether you’re in Kuching or KL, even though they sit in two different statutes that changed on two different dates.
The headline changes: maximum weekly working hours dropped from 48 to 45. Paternity leave was introduced nationwide for the first time, a genuinely new entitlement rather than a tweak to an old one. Maternity leave was extended. Flexible working arrangement requests became something employees can formally request and employers must formally respond to, rather than an informal favour. None of this reached Sarawak workers through the peninsular law they weren’t covered by. It reached them only once Sarawak’s own Ordinance was amended in 2025, which is the part most “Employment Act guide to Malaysia” articles never mention, because most of them are written with only Peninsular Malaysia in mind.
What Are the Core Entitlements in 2026?
The table below reflects the harmonised entitlements as they generally apply nationwide, including Sarawak, following the recent round of amendments. Treat the exact figures as a starting point for your own contract, not a substitute for checking the Sarawak Labour Ordinance or your employer’s HR policy directly.
| Entitlement | Figure | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Maximum work week | 45 hours | Reduced from 48 (Peninsular 2023; Sarawak 2025) |
| Annual leave | 8 / 12 / 16 days | By service: under 2 yrs / 2–5 yrs / over 5 yrs |
| Sick leave (no hospitalisation) | 14 / 18 / 22 days | By service: under 2 yrs / 2–5 yrs / 5 yrs or more |
| Hospitalisation leave | Up to 60 days | Combined annual cap, inclusive of ordinary sick leave taken |
| Maternity leave | 98 days | Extended from 60 days (Peninsular 2023; Sarawak 2025) |
| Paternity leave | 7 days | New entitlement (Peninsular from 2023; Sarawak from its 2025 amendment) |
| Overtime rate (normal working day) | 1.5x hourly rate | Higher rates apply for rest days and public holidays |
The overtime detail people trip on most is the wage threshold. Above a certain monthly wage, the statute’s overtime provisions stop applying, so a well-paid manager and a shift-based retail worker are not necessarily protected the same way, even though both technically fall “under” the same law. If overtime pay is the thing you’re actually trying to work out, check where your own salary sits against the current threshold before assuming the 1.5x rate applies to you.
How Do You File a Complaint Against an Employer in Kuching?
If you’re in Sarawak, your complaint goes to the Sarawak Labour Department, not JTKSM. That’s the single most useful practical fact in this entire piece, because a worker in Kuching who Googles “Employment Act complaint Malaysia” and lands on a peninsular government contact number is calling the wrong department. The Sarawak Labour Department handles wage disputes, unpaid overtime, unlawful termination, and leave entitlement complaints for anyone employed within the state, and it operates independently of its peninsular counterpart.
The general process looks similar wherever you are in Malaysia: lodge a complaint (usually in writing, with your employment contract and payslips to hand), the department investigates, and it can order remedies including back pay. If you’re employed in Peninsular Malaysia, the equivalent body is JTKSM, working under the Employment Act 1955. Confirm the current contact details and complaint procedure directly with the Sarawak Labour Department before relying on secondhand instructions, since procedures and contact points do get updated.
Why Does This Confuse So Many Employers and Workers?
Because the written law has been harmonised faster than the awareness of it. Plenty of HR departments in KL, transferring a hire to a Kuching office, still draft the offer letter around the Employment Act 1955 by habit, not realising the Sarawak Labour Ordinance is the actual governing instrument for that employee from day one. Plenty of Kuching workers, meanwhile, have only ever heard of “the Employment Act” because that’s the name that shows up in every national news article and government press release, and never learn that their own contract sits under a differently named statute administered by a different department down the road.
The entitlement figures being close to identical now papers over the problem rather than solving it. It means most people never notice the gap, right up until something goes wrong, a complaint gets filed with the wrong department, or a contract clause references the wrong act by name and creates a genuine ambiguity about which law actually governs the dispute. Two statutes, two departments, one country. That’s not a footnote. That’s the system.
Last updated: July 2026. Figures checked against the Employment Act 1955 (as amended by the Employment (Amendment) Act 2022, in force 1 Jan 2023) and the Sarawak Labour Ordinance (as amended by the Labour Ordinance of Sarawak (Amendment) Act 2025, in force 1 May 2025), via the Ministry of Human Resources, the Sarawak Labour Department, and Malaysian law-firm summaries.
Keep exploring Kuching Insider: Working in Kuching, Malaysia’s minimum wage, EPF explained, and SOCSO explained.