MAQIS Fees and Import Permit Costs Explained

Owners ask about the permit fee first, and it is the wrong first question. Not because the answer is hidden, but because it is small.

Malaysia’s statutory rates sit in the Malaysian Quarantine and Inspection Services (Fees and Charges) Regulations, gazetted as P.U. (A) 115 and still published by MAQIS. Four tables. Every rate for a dog or a cat is there, in ringgit, per animal or per day.

What it cannot tell you is how long your animal stays, or whether the breed needs written approval first. This guide reads the MAQIS fees pet import files carry line by line, then shows where the real variance lives. Our pet relocation pricing page covers what sits on top. The video below runs through the route these fees attach to.

The gazette splits its rates across four schedules, and a pet file touches three of them. Reading them in the order the animal experiences them makes the structure obvious.

• Permit issuance (First Schedule). Charged when the import permit is issued. Rated per animal, with a separate higher rate for restricted dog breeds.
• Inspection (Second Schedule). Charged when the consignment is inspected at the point of entry. Dogs and cats carry different rates, and import and export differ too.
• Quarantine confinement (Fourth Schedule, Part A). Charged per animal per day for the whole stay. This is the only rate that compounds.
• Quarantine procedures (Fourth Schedule, Part B). Supervision, escort mileage and vehicle parking inside the MAQIS compound. Situational rather than automatic.

A fifth line sits alongside them: the quarantine certificate issued on release, gazetted at a flat rate per animal. None of these is the permit application itself, which is filed by an authorised agent and covered in how to get a MAQIS import permit for your pet.

The table below pulls every rate touching a dog or cat file into one view, compiled from all four schedules rather than any single page.

Two lines deserve a note. The anti-rabies and microchip rates apply only where the station performs the procedure. Most animals arrive already vaccinated and chipped, as our guide to microchip rules for pets in Malaysia explains.

Search the question and you will find one number repeated confidently across guides and forums. It is not the number in the schedule.

There are honest reasons a smaller figure spreads. Some sources quote an older rate. Some quote a processing charge rather than the issuance fee. Some describe Sabah or Sarawak, which run import controls separate from Peninsular Malaysia. Once a figure enters circulation it gets copied forward.

A published rate that no one has re-read in a decade still outranks the regulation that replaced it.

The money at stake is mild: tens of ringgit, not thousands. The trust is not. An owner who budgets from a stale figure receives a different invoice, then starts doubting every other number in the file. It is the same pattern behind several common pet import mistakes that delay entry: not a wrong action, a stale source.

Check the gazette, or ask whoever is filing to show you which line their figure comes from. Both take a minute.

Four variables can change a statutory total. The chart ranks them by the ringgit each one moves, holding everything else constant.

Read the ranking as a planning instruction. Three of the four are fixed once you decide which animal is moving. Only quarantine length is still open, and the country of departure sets it: scheduled origins skip quarantine, non-scheduled ones do not. That fact deserves more attention than the whole rate card, and our pet quarantine at KLIA page explains it.

The gazette names the restricted group explicitly: Rottweiler, Doberman, German Shepherd or Alsatian including Belgian Shepherd and East European Shepherd, Bull Mastiff, Bull Terrier, Perro de Presa Canario, and mixes of those breeds.

Owners tend to read the higher MAQIS permit fee as the constraint. It is not. A restricted-breed move needs written approval from the Director General of MAQIS before a permit can be applied for at all. That approval carries conditions the fee does not hint at: minimum age, pedigree documentation, chip details recorded against the pedigree, and an inspection of the premises where the dog will live.

So the extra RM60 buys nothing except the right to be assessed. Whether the assessment succeeds is a separate question, and banned and restricted dog breeds in Malaysia covers the lists.

The asymmetry surprises people who assume a move out is a move in reversed. The table holds a seven-day arrival quarantine for import and none for export.

One caveat matters more than the arithmetic. A low Malaysian export charge tells you nothing about what waits at the other end. The destination’s own testing, permit and quarantine regime is usually the expensive half, whether the animal flies or crosses by road as in driving a dog to Singapore via the Causeway. Our pet export from Malaysia page maps that side.

The gazetted daily rates look incidental next to airfreight. They stop looking incidental in three situations.

• Multiple animals. Every rate is per animal. A household moving three cats and a dog pays four permits, four inspections and four daily confinement lines.
• An extended stay. The compulsory minimum is seven days, but the period can be extended on risk assessment and the daily rate simply continues. Nothing caps it.
• More than one dog. Dogs are rated at double the cat rate per day, so a multi-dog file compounds faster than owners model.

None of this makes quarantine expensive in absolute terms. It makes it the one line that rewards planning. The way to reduce it is to fly from an origin that does not trigger it, and that is decided months earlier. Our international pet transport routes page shows which origins we move animals from.

The table holds the fixed lines constant and lets only the confinement days move.

The shape is the useful part. Fixed charges dominate at seven days and become a rounding error by sixty, when the file is almost purely a daily rate. So a permit query and a quarantine query deserve different amounts of your attention. Permit validity, covered in how long a MAQIS import permit stays valid, matters for scheduling rather than for cost.

Set the statutory total beside a real move and the proportion becomes clear. A few hundred ringgit of gazetted charges sits inside a file where the flight alone is a multiple of that.

• Airline and freight charges. Set by the carrier on crate weight and volume, and the single largest line on almost every file.
• Crate and conditioning. An IATA-compliant container sized to the animal, bought once and used once.
• Veterinary and laboratory work. Examination, vaccination, parasite treatment and, for several destinations, a rabies titre test at an approved laboratory.
• Destination-country fees. The receiving authority’s own permit, inspection and quarantine charges, which on some routes dwarf the Malaysian side.
• Agent handling. Permit filing, scheduling, airport lodgement and collection, as our note on why only authorised agents can file pet permits explains.

None of this argues for ignoring the gazetted rates. Read them as the audit trail on the small, fixed part of the bill you can verify to the ringgit. Treat everything else as the part that needs a quote.

Owners come to this question wanting reassurance that the paperwork will not cost a fortune. It will not. The MAQIS fees pet import files carry come to roughly RM102 for a cat and RM152 for a dog on a standard seven-day arrival, all traceable to a published schedule.

The more useful shift is what you do with that. A quote that itemises its statutory lines and matches the gazette tells you something about how the rest of it was built. One that folds everything into a single figure tells you something too.

Ask for the split. Then spend your planning effort on days in quarantine and the destination’s own requirements, where the money and the delays actually live. My Pet Mover handles import, export and relocation files across the Klang Valley and KLIA, and we will show you which line each figure comes from.

1. How much is the MAQIS import permit fee for a dog or cat?

The gazetted issuance rate is RM40 per animal for a dog or a cat, in either direction. Restricted dog breeds are rated separately at RM100 per animal. Lower figures circulate online, often a few ringgit per head, but the published schedule of fees and charges is the instrument with legal force.

2. What are the quarantine fees for a pet in Malaysia?

Confinement is gazetted at RM10 per dog per day and RM5 per cat per day, plus a RM2 quarantine certificate per animal on release. Over the compulsory minimum of seven days that comes to RM72 for a dog and RM37 for a cat. The rate continues for any extension.

3. Are MAQIS fees charged per animal or per household?

Per animal, on every line. A family moving two cats and a dog pays three permit fees, three inspection charges and three separate daily confinement charges. There is no household or consignment rate for dogs and cats in the schedule, so multi-pet files scale directly with headcount.

4. Does the pet owner pay MAQIS directly?

Usually not. Import and export permits for pets are filed by an authorised agent, and the statutory charges are typically settled through that agent and passed through on the invoice. Ask for them to be itemised — every line should match a rate in the published schedule, and any figure that does not is a service charge.

5. Do MAQIS fees cover the flight and the crate?

No. The schedule covers permits, inspection, quarantine confinement and quarantine procedures only. Airfreight, the IATA-compliant crate, veterinary examination, vaccination, titre testing where required, and the destination country’s own charges all sit outside it and usually account for most of the total cost of a move.