What a hawker actually clears after the gas and the free chilli

My rough guess is that a hawker clears about a fifth of the till, and has to pay herself for the hours out of that. I couldn't find anyone publishing a Malaysian hawker's margin, so that fifth is a sum on a napkin, and I'll show you the napkin.

The best accounts are across the causeway

The nearest thing to a stall's books is a 2015 study in Singapore's trade ministry's economic survey, whose authors say the views are their own. It leans on about 1,000 face-to-face surveys of stallholders in each of 2012 and 2013.¹

Raw materials took 59% of a typical stall's monthly costs, and nothing else came close.¹ Pay was next, then rent.

It's another country, in Singapore dollars, in government-built hawker centres, and more than a decade old. It also counts costs and gives no profit figure, so the last step is mine.

A stall that doesn't exist

Say she sells a hundred plates a day at seven ringgit, so seven hundred ringgit goes in the drawer. I've assumed costs eat four-fifths of that, then spread them in roughly Singapore's proportions and rounded to fives.

Where the takings go, my rough guess

A fifth of seven hundred is a hundred and forty ringgit a day. Over twenty-six days that's about three thousand six hundred a month, and notice there's no salary for her anywhere in the sketch.

That's the word "clears" doing a lot of work. Her wage, her sick days and whatever she's saving for later all come out of that one slice.

The four-fifths is the weakest number here. If costs are nine-tenths instead, the same stall clears about seventy ringgit a day, and the early start looks a lot worse.

Gas is the line that can jump

In May 2025, an enforcement push told businesses, hawker stalls included, to use purple commercial cylinders.³ Those cost RM70, against RM26 for the subsidised kind.²

The president of a coffee shop association offered an example: a prawn noodle stall on two cylinders a day goes from RM52 to RM140, and a bowl could rise by more than RM1.² It's his illustration, not one stall's bill, and I'd guess a pot of stock burns gas faster than my made-up stall would.

Still, that extra RM88 a day would take most of what my stall clears.²

Then it softened. By July 2025 the minister was saying small food traders could stay on subsidised cylinders if they offered what he called "rakyat prices", with a committee to work out what those were.³ I couldn't find the final rule, so I can't tell you which cylinder any given stall should be using.

The free chilli

The free spoonful has no line on the bill, and I couldn't find a figure for what it costs a stall. The closest I got is one trader in Pantai Dalam, via RinggitPlus summarising the New Straits Times in 2022, saying chilli had gone from RM20 to RM30 a kilo and he had to factor that into his sambal kicap.⁵

So here's another guess. Say the free spoonful costs my stall twenty sen a plate. That's twenty ringgit a day, about a seventh of what she clears, handed out with a smile to people who then ask for more.

You can't put a price rise on something that's free, so it has to land on the plate. Which brings us to the odd part.

Why the plate barely moves

The Singapore study has a neat answer. A 1% rise in raw material costs went with a 0.56% rise in food prices, and the same rise in rent with 0.03%.¹

Ingredients are well over half of costs, so as I read it that's close to passing the whole rise on. On the same sum, only about a quarter of a rent rise reached the plate, and the stallholder ate the rest.

What S$500 more a month adds to a stall's prices, in Singapore cents

Rent is the more telling part. Subsidised stalls paid about S$200 a month and the others about S$1,250, yet their food prices were broadly similar.¹ The authors suggest hawkers price at what the market can bear, and one other stall selling the same dish meant prices 8.4% lower.¹

So the price is less a sum than a stare across the aisle at the next stall. That's Singapore, but stallholders told The Star in Johor Baru in 2025 that customers expect cheap food and the stall absorbs what it can.⁴

One said a 20 sen rise on her otak-otak was her first in over five years; another had cut portions and used fewer pieces of meat or seafood.⁴ That's the other way a plate gets dearer: same number, less prawn.

For anyone running a stall, the idea I'd keep is that ingredients are the rise customers wear, and the rest mostly comes out of you. So rent is the thing to fight hardest before you sign, because you may not get to pass it on.