Chicken stopped moving

11 September 2026 · Analitik

Between the end of March and the end of June 2026, standard whole chicken got considerably more expensive in Malaysia. The national average moved from RM8.08/kg in the week of 30 March to RM9.63/kg by 29 June, a rise of just under 19% in three months.

Then it stopped.

Nine weeks inside three sen

From 29 June to 24 August the national average sat between RM9.5955 and RM9.6256. That is a range of three sen, or 0.31%, across nine consecutive weeks of a fresh, perishable commodity with no fixed shelf life and a supply chain exposed to feed costs, weather and festival demand.

Flat averages of that kind rarely happen on their own. They are the signature of an administered price rather than a cleared market, and Malaysia has used ceiling prices on chicken before. This data cannot confirm that a scheme is in force, and we have not verified one — but a nine-week plateau three sen wide is the thing you would look for if you suspected one.

The average is the flattest part of the market

The stability is entirely in the national aggregate. Underneath it, the spread across premises stays enormous. In the same settled weeks the cheapest recorded premises sit near RM6.90–7.60/kg while the dearest run to RM13.00–13.50/kg. The same bird, in the same week, costs roughly twice as much at one end of the country as the other.

So “the price of chicken” is doing two different things at once. As a national number it has barely moved since June. As a thing a household actually pays, it depends far more on which shop you walk into than on which week it is.

That is the case for looking at dispersion rather than the headline, and it is why manamurah indexes individual premises instead of publishing a single national figure.

Method

National weekly averages for item code 1, AYAM BERSIH - STANDARD, 1kg, from PriceCatcher via manamurah. The window runs 16 March to 24 August 2026.

Two later weeks were excluded, not because they disagreed but because they were incomplete at the time of capture:

• 2026-08-31 — 869 premises reporting against a typical 1,150.
• 2026-09-07 — 3,649 observations against a typical 6,000. The week was still in flight.

An incomplete week is not a cheap week. Including the most recent weekdate because it is the most recent is the single easiest way to publish a price move that never happened, and the figures above deliberately stop short of it.