M’sia Faces Worst Job Loss Since COVID-19 Pandemic As 52,607 Lose Their Jobs By Mid-July | WeirdKaya

Every single month of 2026 has been worse than the same month last year. Here is what PERKESO’s data actually shows.

I have been staring at the same number for two days: 52,607.

That is how many Malaysians had applied for unemployment benefits as of July 16, according to the latest Loss of Employment (LOE) report from PERKESO’s Employment Insurance System.

If the pace holds, 2026 is on course to be the worst year for job losses this country has seen since the pandemic.

Here is what the data says, and just as importantly, what it does not.

First, what this number actually counts

I want to be precise about this, because a lot of the posts circulating right now are not.

These are EIS unemployment benefit applications, but they are not a count of every job lost in Malaysia.

To show up in this dataset, you need to be a private-sector employee contributing to EIS, you need to have lost your job involuntarily, and you need to have filed within 60 days of your last working day.

2025 took a full year to reach 74,841

That was the comparison that made me sit up. All of 2025 produced 74,841 applications. We hit 52,607 in six and a half months.

For context, the worst year on record under this system was 2020, when more than 107,024 cases came through.

At the current run rate, 2026 is tracking to exceed that of 2024 and 2025’s figure, which would make it the heaviest year of job losses since the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

Back in 2020, the Human Resources Ministry told Parliament that EIS loss-of-employment registrations stood at 50,825 as of July 1.

Today, we are at 52,607. Different cut-off dates, roughly two weeks apart, so this is not a perfect like-for-like. But we are broadly running at pandemic-year pace.

Every single month was worse than last year

This is the part that convinced me it is not just one big company doing a mass layoff and skewing the chart. It is broad, and it is consistent.

That is a 38% jump in a single year. January alone was up 70%. And look at the last three months on that table: April 7,162, May 7,766, June 8,100. After the Q1 spike faded, the trend started climbing again.

If your mental image of a retrenched worker is someone on a factory floor, the data is going to surprise you.

Professionals, managers, executives and technicians made up 51% of everyone who lost their job this year.

Professionals were the single largest group at 13,461 cases (26%), followed by technicians at 7,104 (14%) and managers at 6,165 (12%). Three occupation categories, more than half the tota

Why white collar jobs keep getting hit?

Maybank Investment Bank points to VSS, MSS and early retirement packages as consistently leading causes.

Higher-skilled staff are more likely to accept these schemes because the compensation is decent and they are more confident of finding something new.

This is not a 2026 blip either: high-skilled workers made up more than half of all retrenchments between 2021 and 2025, despite being only 30.5% of the workforce.

Here is where the “only PMET kena” reading falls apart. Almost 44% of everyone retrenched this year was earning below RM3,000 a month. That is 20,878 people in total.

The single biggest salary band affected was RM2,000 to RM2,999, with 11,298 cases. Nearly one in four applicants.

So it is not a white-collar story or a low-income story. It is both at once, which is exactly why it feels like everyone knows someone who got cut this year.

KL & Selangor hardest hit

Kuala Lumpur recorded 15,893 cases (30%) and Selangor 15,228 (29%). Between them, almost 60% of the entire country’s job losses. Johor came a distant third at 4,035 (8%), with Penang at 3,530 (7%).

By sector, services took the overwhelming majority with 36,040 cases (69%), then manufacturing at 10,260 (20%) and construction at 5,403 (10%).

Drilled down to individual industry divisions, manufacturing was still the single biggest at 20%, with wholesale and retail trade behind it at 18%.

Based on PERKESO’s own report notes, it pointed out that applications actually fell 4% in Q2 compared with Q1. Almost nobody is quoting that line.

There is other context worth holding too. Job vacancies rose to around 107,000 in March, and the national unemployment rate has been sitting at 2.9% for months.

If this happens to you, you have 60 days

Here’s what you should do if you find yourself jobless:

• File within 60 days of your last working day: Miss it and you forfeit the benefit entirely. Apply through the Lindung Kerjaya portal or at any PERKESO office.
• Job Search Allowance runs 3 to 6 months: Paid at 80% of your assumed insured wage in month one, then stepping down through 50%, 40% and 30%. Length depends on your contribution history.
• VSS and MSS still count: Accepting a separation scheme does not disqualify you. Plain resignation and dismissal for misconduct do.
• Register with MYFutureJobs: It is a condition of receiving the allowance, not an optional extra. You also unlock training and placement support.

As of June 12, PERKESO approved 134,123 EIS claims with recommended payouts of RM248.23 million, and the Human Resources Ministry has put more than RM580 million behind the PACE Economic Resilience Package, expected to support over 56,000 retrenched workers.

Not legal advice. This article explains publicly reported PERKESO data and general EIS entitlements

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