In its latest report, “The State of Households 2024: Households and the Pandemic 2019-2022”, KRI said while not all districts experienced an uptick in absolute poverty, urban households were the most affected, with poverty rising to 4.5% in 2022 from 3.8% in 2019.

Kuala Lumpur recorded the highest household increases in absolute poverty with 6,774 households, followed by Kuala Muda, Kedah (5,229 households) and Kota Kinabalu, Sabah (5,117 households).

Covid-19 was first detected in Wuhan, China, in 2019 and declared a pandemic in 2020.

Putrajaya implemented movement restrictions in 2020 that led to businesses shutting down and an increase in unemployment, and also declared a state of emergency the following year to curb the spread of the virus.

KRI also found that residual income struggles affected households in the lower income deciles.

“This trend was further exacerbated through the Covid-19 related EPF withdrawal schemes, which collectively resulted in over 90% of EPF members under 30 not having enough in basic savings for retirement,” the report read.

It also said that while the total number of Malaysian households increased in 2022, larger households declined, leading to a noticeable shift toward smaller, individual living arrangements.

One-income-recipient households remained common, it said, although their proportion decreased slightly to 44.6% in 2022 from the 46.3% recorded in 2019, which “reflected a shift towards more households with additional income sources” as the economy began to recover.

Household income grew at a much slower rate compared to the decade before the pandemic, namely between 2009 and 2019, dropping from 5.3% to 1%.

KRI said Selangor led household income growth, while urban areas like Putrajaya and Kuala Lumpur saw declines.

The report also found that the national average real median household disposable income dropped significantly from RM110 during 2016–2019 (2.1%) to just RM16 (1.0%) in the 2019–2020 period.