Nearly every café, salon, and retail store in Malaysia runs on a mix of full-time and part-time staff — and nearly every scheduling article, template, and piece of software treats them identically. They aren't. The Employment (Part-Time Employees) Regulations 2010 [P.U. (A) 303] sets out a genuinely separate rulebook, with different leave entitlements, a different overtime structure, and even a rest-day rule that only applies once someone crosses a specific threshold. Get this wrong and you're either overpaying without realizing it, or quietly breaking the law without meaning to.
Who this actually covers
Two groups are explicitly excluded from these Regulations (Regulation 3): casual employees — anyone engaged occasionally/irregularly whose weekly hours don't exceed 30% of a full-timer's normal hours — and home-based workers. Everyone else genuinely working part-time hours for you is covered.
If you don't have a comparable full-time role to measure against, the Regulations default a full-timer's normal hours to 8 hours a day / 48 hours a week, and a part-timer's normal hours to 70% of that (Regulation 4).
Overtime: a genuinely different structure
This is the detail most scheduling tools get completely wrong by just applying the standard 1.5× rule blindly. For part-timers (Regulation 5), overtime pay actually has two tiers:
- Normal hourly rate — for hours beyond the part-timer's own agreed hours, but still within what a comparable full-timer would work
- 1.5× hourly rate — only for hours that exceed what a comparable full-timer would work
In other words, a part-timer scheduled 4 hours who ends up working 6 isn't automatically owed overtime premium for those extra 2 hours — only once they cross the full-timer's normal hours does the 1.5× rate kick in. Getting this backwards (paying 1.5× from the very first extra hour) means overpaying every part-time shift extension.
Public holidays: 7, not 11 — and a shorter compulsory list
Part-timers get 7 gazetted public holidays a year (not the 11 full-timers get), of which just 4 are compulsory: National Day, the Agong's Birthday, the Ruler's Birthday (or Federal Territory Day), and Workers' Day — notably, Malaysia Day isn't on the compulsory list for part-timers the way it is for full-timers. The same substitution logic applies if a holiday falls on a rest day, and employers still have to post the same before-the-year notice for the remaining gazetted holidays (Regulation 6) — see the full Public Holiday Pay guide for how that notice requirement works in detail.
Working a public holiday: 2 days' wages on top of holiday pay (same as full-timers), but the overtime rate for hours beyond normal hours is 2× up to a full-timer's hours, and 3× only beyond that.
Annual leave and sick leave: genuinely different day counts
This is easy to miss entirely: part-timers don't get the same leave entitlements as full-timers, scaled down — they have their own separate day counts, on the same under-2/2-5/5+ year tenure structure:
| Tenure | Part-time annual leave | Part-time sick leave |
|---|---|---|
| Under 2 years | 6 days | 10 days |
| 2–5 years | 8 days | 13 days |
| 5+ years | 11 days | 15 days |
Compare this to full-timers' 8/12/16 annual leave and 14/18/22 sick leave days on the same tenure bands — genuinely different numbers, not a proportional scaling of the full-time entitlement.
Rest day: a threshold most people don't know exists
Here's a detail that barely appears anywhere: a part-time employee is only entitled to a weekly rest day if they work 5 or more days a week, with total hours of at least 20 a week (Regulation 9). A part-timer working fewer days or fewer hours than that simply isn't covered by this rest-day entitlement at all under these Regulations — worth knowing before assuming every part-timer automatically gets one.
Where it does apply: working a rest day pays 2 days' wages at ordinary rate, with overtime beyond normal hours at 1.5× up to a full-timer's hours and 2× beyond that.
The fines are real and itemized separately
Almost every provision in these Regulations carries its own separate offence and fine — up to RM10,000 per breach — for failing to pay the correct overtime rate, the correct holiday rate, the correct rest-day rate, annual leave pay, sick leave pay, or unutilized leave payout on termination. These aren't abstract; they're specifically written into the Regulations provision by provision.
The practical takeaway
If your roster mixes full-time and part-time staff — which describes almost every café, salon, and retail team — the single easiest mistake is applying one set of rules to everyone. Part-timers have their own overtime tiers, their own leave day counts, and a rest-day entitlement that only kicks in past a real hours/days threshold. None of this is exotic or rare; it's the actual default rulebook for a huge share of Malaysian shift-based teams, just rarely implemented correctly.