How we counted | The Harga Index

The Harga Index is a hand-collected snapshot of what four everyday Malaysian items cost, listed state by state. This page is the working: where every number came from, how it was chosen, and what it cannot tell you. The full dataset is free to download.

619prices recorded

480restaurants and cafes

73towns and cities

15states and federal territories

📋Where the prices come from

Every price was read off a public delivery-platform listing on foodpanda.my between 11 and 13 August 2026. No login, no account, no private data. If you open the source link on any row of the dataset you land on the same public page we read.

We record the original listed price, before any promotion or platform discount. That is the only figure that stays comparable across states and across weeks.

How each item is defined

Item	What counts	Prices
Nasi lemak	Nasi lemak served with fried or spiced chicken, the most commonly ordered version	150
Ayam gepuk	The basic set: smashed fried chicken with rice	152
Iced kopi	The cheapest iced local coffee on that outlet's menu	150
Iced matcha	The cheapest iced matcha drink on that outlet's menu	150
Most expensive nasi lemak	The single most expensive nasi lemak of any kind we could find in that state	15
Other nasi lemak	One plain nasi lemak biasa and one set meal. Kept in the dataset for completeness, excluded from every median	2

Those six rows add up to the 619 prices above.

How many places per state

We aimed for ten listings per item per state, taken from the platform's own results for that item in the state's largest one or two cities. Most states landed on exactly ten; a few reached eleven or twelve.

Two came in lower. Nasi lemak in Perlis and Putrajaya stopped at eight, because eight is all the platform had. We searched from several angles and swept the city listings; those two are a complete count of what exists there, not a sample that ran short.

The priciest tier

Finding the most expensive nasi lemak in a state needs a different method than sampling. We searched deliberately for premium versions (prawn, squid, lamb, wagyu, rendang and cafe interpretations) and re-read the menus we already had, looking for the highest-priced nasi lemak of any description. One row per state, fifteen in total.

These are premium sets, and we say so: the RM40.00 top of the table is a Set 7 Udang, a prawn set. It is not a plain nasi lemak and we have never presented it as one.

⚖️What this data cannot tell you

Every dataset has edges. Here are ours, stated plainly, so you can judge how far to push the numbers.

Delivery prices are not counter prices. Restaurants commonly list higher on delivery platforms than they charge in store. Treat these as delivery-menu prices, which is what they are, and expect the same dish to cost less if you walk in.
Only restaurants on the platform are visible. A warung with no delivery listing does not appear here, however good or cheap it is. This is a census of a platform, not of Malaysia.
Ayam gepuk skews toward chains, because chains are what the platform mostly carries for that dish. Where a state ran out of ayam gepuk listings entirely, we counted the closest equivalent smashed-fried-chicken sets to complete the ten. That affects ten rows out of 152.
Drinks are the cheapest option on each menu, not a like-for-like size or recipe. A kopitiam kopi ais and a cafe iced latte are different products; the comparison is about what the cheapest iced coffee costs you, not about the coffee itself.
It is a three-day snapshot. Menus change. Every row carries the date it was read so you can see exactly how old a number is.
Medians, not averages. Every state figure is a median, so one unusual listing cannot drag a state up or down.

🔍How we kept it honest

No row without a source. Every price carries the restaurant page it came from and the date it was read. Nothing was estimated, remembered or filled in.
No row without a fetch. A price is only recorded after opening that exact restaurant page. During collection one row was added without one; it was caught, re-read and corrected before publication.
Duplicates checked by source, not by name. The same restaurant can appear under two display names, so matching is done on the source page.
Pages we could not read were skipped, not guessed. A handful of listings would not render for us. They are absent rather than approximated.

📊The data

The complete dataset, one row per price, free to download and free to use.

Download the CSV 619 rows · 22 KB

What the columns mean

Column	Meaning
`dish`	`nasi_lemak`, `ayam_gepuk`, `kopi` or `matcha`
`tier`	Which version of the dish. `ayam` is the headline nasi lemak tier, `premium` the priciest-in-state row, `set` the basic ayam gepuk, `iced` the drinks
`restaurant`	Outlet name as listed
`city`, `state`	Where the outlet is
`item_name`	The menu item, exactly as the restaurant writes it
`price_rm_original`	Listed price in ringgit, before any discount
`source`	The public page the price was read from
`collected`	Date it was read

📎Using and citing this

The dataset and the findings are free to use, including commercially and by news organisations, as long as you credit The Harga Index by Share Eat! and link back. Charts and images from the Index are free to republish on the same terms.

If you are writing about it, this is the citation:

The Harga Index, Volume 1 (Share Eat!, August 2026).
619 hand-collected food prices across 15 Malaysian states and federal territories.
https://shareeat.io/harga/

Volume 1 · collected 11–13 August 2026 · published August 2026. This page and the CSV link are permanent; if a figure is ever corrected, the correction is noted here rather than quietly changed.
Found a price that looks wrong? Tell us and we will check the source page and correct it: WhatsApp 014-679 1868.

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