Only a company licensed by the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture may lodge an MM2H application. That is the whole reason the licensed-agent register exists.
It also means the relationship is narrower than the marketing around it suggests.
What a licensed company does
Lodges the application. This is the part that legally requires the licence.
Compiles and certifies the supporting documents. Passports, medical reports, proof of the deposit, the paperwork around the residence.
Handles correspondence with the ministry and the immigration department, and tracks the application through its stages.
For an applicant who does not read Malay, is not in the country, and has no experience of the process, that is genuine work with genuine value.
What it cannot do
It cannot approve your application, because that decision belongs to the ministry. It cannot change a financial threshold either: the deposit, the participation fee and the minimum property value are set per category and no company negotiates them.
It certainly cannot guarantee an outcome. A company offering one is either misdescribing its role or selling something it does not control.
And it cannot make you eligible. If you fall short of a category’s requirements, the answer is a different category or a different pass. Not a different agent.
Checking a licence before you pay
Two things have to match: the company name, and the licence number in the form MM2H followed by three or four digits.
The ministry also publishes a validity period against each licence. Read it, but read it carefully. A period shown as ended is not proof that a company is unlicensed, because the register can lag behind a renewal. It is a prompt to ask the question, not an answer to it.
All three fields are published by the ministry itself, so anything a company tells you about its own licence can be checked against them directly.
On fees
An agent’s service fee is the one number in MM2H that nobody can quote for you. It is not in the ministry register, it is set commercially by each company, and it varies.
What you can insist on is a quotation that separates five distinct things, because they behave completely differently:
| What it is | Do you get it back | |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed deposit | USD32,000 to USD1 million by category, at a licensed Malaysian institution | Yours; half may be withdrawn after approval |
| Participation fee | RM1,000 to RM200,000, one-off, per principal | No |
| Processing fee | RM5,000 for the principal, RM2,500 per dependant | No |
| Property purchase | RM600,000 to RM2 million, compulsory after approval | An asset, but unsellable for ten years |
| The company’s service fee | Set commercially, published nowhere | No |
Only the first is capital. The middle three are government charges you can verify against the ministry’s own comparison table before anyone quotes them to you. The last is the only figure that is genuinely the company’s to set, and it is the one most often folded into a single headline number.
The processing fee is worth singling out, because it does not appear on the individual category pages at all, only on the comparison table. A quotation that omits it is not necessarily dishonest, but it is incomplete, and RM2,500 per dependant adds up quickly across a family.
Where this site stands
This is a reference, not an agency. It does not lodge applications, cannot influence one, takes no payment for placement, and lists every licensed company the ministry publishes, in full, without ranking them.