KUALA LUMPUR – The 2023 Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF) dividend, which remains strong, gives employees confidence in the performance of their retirement savings investment while also indicating stable and improving economic growth, said the Malaysian Trades Union Congress.
Its president, Mohd Effendy Abdul Ghani, welcomed the announcement and said that the increase in the shariah savings dividend to 5.40% from 4.75% in 2022 could encourage more contributors to choose shariah savings in the future.
“We believe that stable economic growth will increase employment opportunities and indirectly increase the number of EPF contributors, as we can see in 2023 when production has returned to pre-epidemic levels,” he said in a statement.
Today, the EPF announced a dividend rate of 5.50% for conventional savings, totaling RM50.33 billion, and 5.40% for shariah savings, totaling RM7.48 billion. This includes the total income distribution for 2023, which is as much as RM57.81 billion.
Effendy said that the EPF’s commitment to maintaining a strong dividend provides employees with certainty about the long-term growth of employee savings, particularly retirement savings.
“It is to ensure that each contributor has a total savings amount of at least around RM240,000 when they retire,” he said.
“Contributor awareness is also necessary to maintain additional years of savings accumulation and productive employment will increase savings to enable a higher (savings) amount during retirement later.” – March 3, 2024