How a money changer earns without charging a fee

There's no fee on the board because the fee is the gap between the two columns on it. A money changer sells you dollars for a little more than it pays someone else for them, and it lives on that little, many times a day.

I couldn't find what a counter actually keeps, and I looked, so the sum further down is mine.

How the gap gets earned

What the board is telling you

The two columns are "We Buy" and "We Sell". The plainest statement I can find of how it works is a Kuala Lumpur travel site, which says most changers charge no separate service fee and earn on the margin between the rates. It's a guide and not a regulator, so hold it loosely, but I couldn't find anyone saying otherwise.

That also explains why the same dollar costs different money a few shops apart. With no fee to compete on, the gap is the whole price, so it's the one thing a counter can move.

That site also prints a sample board for the US dollar, buying at 4.55 and selling at 4.70.¹ It's plainly an illustration and not a day's real rates.

On those numbers, RM1,000 taken to dollars and straight back again comes home as about RM968.¹

I'd never do that on purpose, but it's the cleanest way to see the gap. You never see it on one trip, because you only ever pay one side of it.

How wide is it really?

I couldn't find a published set of real buy and sell rates from one counter on one day. The nearest I've got is one customer.

In August 2024 she told The Star that several changers had the US dollar as low as RM4.47.² The same report put the market at RM4.46.²

I'm assuming that's the rate she'd pay, and the two numbers may not be from the same minute. Even so, one sen on RM4.46 is about a fifth of a percent, a long way from that sample board.²

What RM1,000 there and back would lose, in ringgit

So how does anyone live on that?

Volume, I think, and I'd love a real number. The president of the trade association told The Star in December 2025 that changers at one popular Kuala Lumpur mall were getting around 3,000 customers a day.³ That's across however many counters that mall has, and he didn't say how much each customer changed.

So here's a made-up counter. Say it turns over a hundred thousand ringgit on a good day, and keeps a quarter of a percent. That's two hundred and fifty ringgit a day, before rent and salaries, and every number there is my guess.

It isn't nothing, but it's not a fortune for a shop that has to sit on a pile of cash. A company needs a licence from Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and has to meet capital requirements, and operating without one can cost up to RM5 million in fines or ten years in prison.⁵ So it's a small margin on a heavily watched business, and I can see why the licence is worth keeping.

Where the gap stops being safe

The part that surprised me is what's in the drawer. A changer holds the thing it sells, and that thing moves.

That December report had the ringgit at around 4.04 to the US dollar, from near RM4.80.³ Nobody holds a drawer for that whole slide, I assume, but a counter buying dollars all the way down would be taking a little of that fall on each batch. A quarter of a percent, my made-up figure, doesn't leave much room for that.

The other risk is simpler. The trade's president also said an estimated 60% to 70% of exchanges are for travel, and travel can stop.³

It did. In 2020, he said border closures and movement limits cut changers' revenue by almost 80%, while rent and salaries carried on.⁴ BNM data in the same report showed 147 licensed companies no longer operating by that October.⁴

What I'd do with this

If I were changing money, I'd check the market rate first and look at how far the board sits from it. It takes about a minute. The same travel site says airports and hotels are usually worse, which makes sense to me: someone has to pay for that rent, and you're not in a position to walk to the next counter.¹

If I owned a counter, I'd worry less about the width of the gap and more about how fast the drawer turns over. Each extra day a dollar sits there is a day it can lose what it earns.