Myanmar Spring Chronicle – Viewpoint for October 2

(MoeMaKa) October 3, 2025

Pay top-ups for civil servants and pensioners raised by 30,000 kyat, while the public faces unprecedented prices

The military regime announced on September 30 that it would grant civil servants and pensioners an additional allowance of 30,000 kyat per month. This is the third such “additional support payment” since the coup: once in October 2023, once in August 2024, and now again in October 2025.

Instead of legally revising base salary scales, the junta has relied on these “top-up” allowances. One might argue it is because, without a parliament, the junta cannot carry out a formal pay-raise process as an elected government would.

Because this is framed as a special allowance, it does not raise the statutory minimum wage for workers in the private sector such as day laborers and factory workers, leaving them excluded and disadvantaged. In garment and other private factories, the minimum daily wage remains 4,800 kyat, and—because the junta has twice added 1,000-kyat “allowances”—some calculate an effective daily floor of 6,800 kyat, though this often doesn’t factor into base-pay calculations. With the latest 30,000-kyat top-up for government staff and pensioners, people are watching to see whether private-sector daily wages will be increased by another 1,000 kyat.

Since the February 1, 2021 coup, political, military, and diplomatic turmoil has driven the kyat’s depreciation against the U.S. dollar by roughly 300%. From around 1,300 kyat per USD at the time of the coup, the rate climbed to about 4,000 kyat, and at times even 5,000–6,000 kyat per dollar.

More recently, the kyat has strengthened, which many attribute primarily to Thai–Myanmar border trade restrictions. Beginning in August, imports via the Myawaddy–Mae Sot crossing were abruptly halted and even goods already inside Myanmar were seized, sharply reducing demand for foreign currency to pay for Thai goods and thus lifting the kyat.

These restrictions were likely intended to cut tax revenues for armed resistance groups along border trade routes while also reducing foreign-currency demand and propping up the kyat—“killing two birds with one stone.”

However, despite a stronger kyat, the prices of daily necessities, consumer goods, and services have not fallen; many have risen further. The kyat’s rise is not due to sound macroeconomic policy or higher domestic production; rather, it is the result of blocking imports of consumer and industrial inputs, which reduces FX demand but also creates shortages.

For ordinary people, medicines, foodstuffs, and consumer items have become scarcer and costlier. Even in Yangon’s City Mart and its Market Place branches that sell imported goods, shelves are thin and prices unprecedented. Detergent, toothpaste, cooking oil, and medicines have become extremely expensive. Service fees and labor costs are high while goods are scarce; most people are living through a wartime, blockade-like economy. Transport between cities and travel costs have reached levels never seen before.

If this is the situation in big cities like Yangon and Mandalay, conditions are far worse in active conflict areas. People there face soaring medical expenses; many can no longer access services locally and must travel across regions or states for treatment, paying hundreds of thousands of kyat just for transport. In some places a single hospital visit means 400–500 thousand kyat in travel costs alone.

Viewed in this context, the junta’s 30,000-kyat top-up will be quickly swallowed by the surging cost of living. Burdened with the costs of war, the public is struggling to stay afloat—neck-deep in a sea of prices they have never faced before.