Premium Visa Programme (PVIP)

PVIP has four requirements, and the income one is where most applications fail:

• Income of RM40,000 a month — RM480,000 a year. Two things about this are more generous than most write-ups suggest. First, it does not have to be a salary: realised gains on investments, rental income and pension drawdown all count, which is what puts the threshold within reach of a retiree with no employer. Second, it does not have to be offshore. Malaysian-sourced income qualifies too, provided you can show proof of Malaysian income tax paid on it.
• A RM1,000,000 fixed deposit opened with a bank licensed under the Financial Services Act 2013 or its Islamic equivalent. Up to half may be withdrawn after six months, but only against medical, education or property costs, and only as a reimbursement against receipts.
• Participation feesof RM200,000 for the principal, whose term is fixed at 20 years. A dependant chooses: RM100,000 for the same 20 years, or RM50,000 for 10 years. The principal's fee is staged — RM2,000 with the application, RM198,000 on approval.
• An authorised agency — applications cannot be made directly to Immigration.

There is no age limit, which makes PVIP the only long-stay programme available to applicants under 25.

Four conditions sit behind the money, and they apply to dependants as well as to the principal:

• A police clearance certificate from your country of citizenship or residence — a letter of good conduct, certificate of clearance, whatever your jurisdiction issues — translated into English if it is in another language.
• Security screening by the Royal Malaysia Police for everyone aged 18 and over, and no listing as a prohibited immigrant under section 8(3) of the Immigration Act.
• A clean bill of health. A medical report from a registered medical centre inside Malaysia, certifying you free of infectious disease. It is required before the pass is printed, not before you apply.
• Health insurance held for the whole life of the pass — local or international, but with worldwide cover.

Nationality is the one hard exclusion: the programme is open to citizens of every country except Israel and those Malaysia has no diplomatic relations with.

The order of events matters more here than on most programmes, because the capital is committed late rather than early:

1. Your agency files. It has seven working days from receiving your complete documents to submit them. RM2,000 of the participation fee is paid now, and is not refunded if the application fails.
2. The committee decides — up to 60 working days. New applications go to an evaluation committee drawn from the Home Ministry, Immigration, the police and the companies commission, and the Director General of Immigration signs off.
3. A conditional approval letter, valid six months. Inside that window: open the fixed deposit, buy the insurance, take the medical in Malaysia, pay the RM198,000 balance and the pass, visa and bond charges. If you need longer, the extension must be filed at least a month before the letter expires — miss it and the approval is revoked.
4. The pass is issued — three working days. Same three-day handling for the routine transactions afterwards: a deposit withdrawal, moving the endorsement into a renewed passport, a change of nationality, cancelling the pass.

Two later dates are worth putting in a calendar the day you are approved. A renewal at the end of the 20 years has to be filed six months before the pass expires, on whatever terms and fees are in force then rather than the ones you signed up to. And if the pass is cut short by your passport expiring — the usual reason a 20-year programme issues a five-year sticker — the application for the remaining balance goes in three months before the current pass ends.

Three different kinds of money get bundled together in most write-ups of this programme. They are not the same thing:

• Money you do not get back: the government fees. The RM200,000 participation fee is the largest and the only one most write-ups mention, but the pass fee, visa fee and security bond are government charges too — see below.
• Money that stays yours:the RM1,000,000 fixed deposit. It sits in your account under lien, not in the government's.
• Agent fees: set by the agency, not by Immigration, and not published anywhere official. Ask for the figure in writing before you commit. This is the opposite of MM2H, where the agency fee is fixed by the government and there is nothing to negotiate.

A single applicant is therefore looking at a little over RM210,000 in government fees genuinely spent, and RM1,000,000 committed but retained — before agent fees.

The participation fee is a government fee, and it is not the only one. There are four, and a quote that shows you the first and stops has left money out:

• Participation fee — RM200,000 for the principal, RM100,000 or RM50,000 per dependant depending on the term they take.
• Pass fee — RM2,000 per person per year of the approved term, collected up front and again at each renewal. On a five-year approval that is RM10,000 a head, which makes it much the largest of the other three.
• Multiple-entry visa fee — per person per year, set by your nationality.
• Security bond — one-off, set by your nationality for the main applicant and a flat RM10 per dependant.

The last two are priced by passport rather than by programme, so no single figure can be printed here. The cost calculator works all four out against your own nationality and family size, over a five-year initial approval.

Only the agency fee sits outside this list. That one is commercial, set by the agency rather than by Immigration, and published nowhere official — get it in writing.

Pass fee, visa fee and security bond stated by MYPVIP, from the Immigration Department fee schedules, 28 July 2026. The Immigration Department's published PVIP FAQ states none of them, so they rest on attribution rather than on the source cited above.

PVIP is unusually permissive compared with the MM2H family. The Immigration Department lists the following:

• Up to 20 years, with multiple-entry visa facilities
• No minimum stay requirement
• Permission to work and carry out legal business activities
• Permission to study
• Permission to buy residential, commercial or industrial property
• Active investment in permitted fields
• Accompaniment by spouse, children, parents, parents-in-law and one foreign domestic helper

The family list is wider than most programmes' and worth reading closely. A spouse; children — biological, step or adopted — up to the age of 25, with no age limit for a disabled child certified by a doctor; your parents and your parents-in-law; and one foreign domestic helper. Each dependant picks a 10-year or 20-year term independently of the others, which is what makes a shorter term worth costing for a child who will age out of the pass anyway.

What the programme does not give is a route to settlement. Participation confers no eligibility for an Entry Permit or for Malaysian citizenship, and no amount of time held changes that.

The work right used to be the clean line between PVIP and MM2H. It is not any more. MM2H Platinum carries it too — MOTAC's December 2025 guide marks business, investment and career activity Permissible on that tier, and bars it outright on Silver and Gold. So if you intend to earn a living in Malaysia, the realistic routes are PVIP, MM2H Platinum and the Employment Pass, and the choice between the first two turns on capital rather than permission: PVIP pledges RM1,000,000 and compels no property purchase, while Platinum pledges USD 1,000,000 and compels a RM2,000,000 residence you cannot sell for ten years. What PVIP still has to itself is the property question: it never forces you to buy.