How much does halal certification cost in Malaysia?

Short answer: the JAKIM fee for a first year runs from RM120 for a micro business (RM100 plus the RM20 processing fee) to RM1,020 for the largest companies (RM1,000 plus RM20) on the standard schedules. Food premises pay RM100 per premises plus the same RM20. The exception is contract manufacturing by an applicant registered abroad, charged per application at RM2,500 (ASEAN) or RM10,000 (elsewhere) plus a RM200 processing fee. Consultancy, documentation and any physical changes are separate and are not set by JAKIM.

The government fee is published, fixed, and small

Halal certification cost gets discussed as though it were negotiable or obscure. It is neither. The fees are set out in Bahagian III of JAKIM's Manual Prosedur Pensijilan Halal Malaysia (Domestik) 2020, they vary only by scheme and by company size, and every figure on this page is taken from that document.

Two charges apply to every application:

Then a certification fee, which depends on which scheme you are applying under.

Product and service certification

This is the schedule for food and beverage, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, logistics, contract manufacturing and OEM, medical devices, and central kitchens. The band is set by annual turnover.

Food premises

Restaurants, cafés, canteens, bakeries, chain premises, mobile premises, food court cafeterias and kiosks are charged a flat rate per premises. See also halal certification for restaurants and for small and micro businesses.

Hotels are treated separately, and charged per kitchen or restaurant rather than per property. How kitchens are counted is on the hotels and catering page.

Catering, food service and convention centre kitchens are banded by turnover, on a different scale from the product schemes above: the small band runs to RM500,000 rather than RM300,000.

Slaughterhouses

Banded by daily throughput rather than turnover, with different thresholds per animal type. The scheme is covered on the slaughterhouse page.

Foreign-registered applicants

An applicant registered outside Malaysia that manufactures here pays the higher RM200 processing fee. For contract manufacturing the certification fee is charged per application, and the gap between ASEAN and non-ASEAN applicants is substantial. See contract manufacturing. Overseas producers who export rather than manufacture here need a certifier from the recognised list instead.

What that adds up to

Combining the processing fee with the certification fee gives the full government charge for a first year. Nothing else in this table is estimated, both components are published rates.

Other charges

These come up during and after certification. The certificate reprint fee is worth noting: it is RM50 for a Malaysian-registered company and RM1,000 for a foreign-registered one.

Where the real cost sits

The fee is not the expense. The expense is getting to the point where an audit is passable, and almost all of it is internal:

• Documentation. A Halal Assurance System manual (or the lighter Internal Halal Control System for small and micro companies, see HAS and IHCS explained), SOPs, and ingredient records that trace every input to a supplier with current halal status. On most first applications this is the largest block of work.
• Physical change. Segregated storage and production, dedicated utensils, and documented cleaning including samak where required. Sometimes this means capital expenditure; sometimes it only means discipline.
• People. The staff the manual requires, set out in our staffing guide, a trained Internal Halal Committee where you are a large or medium company, and floor staff who can explain the halal control points in their own area without prompting.
• Time. Three to nine months is the usual range, food service at the shorter end and manufacturing at the longer. Most of that is your preparation, not JAKIM's processing.

The single most expensive outcome is failing an audit and having to re-present, because it costs the fee again and it costs the months again.

Payment

Fees are payable within 14 working days of the charge letter issued through MYeHALAL. Late payment causes the application to be rejected, and a rejected application must be submitted again as a new one, so the deadline matters more than its size suggests. The other deadlines in the process are in the application guide, and how long a certificate lasts before the fee comes round again is in validity and renewal.