CIDB N3C Building Material Price API — Monthly Prices by State & Specification

Malaysia's Construction Industry Development Board operates the National Construction Cost Centre (N3C), which publishes monthly average prices for construction material specifications, state by state. Datadory delivers those records as analysis-ready rows: one observation per material specification, per state, per month, each carrying its material group, unit of measure and payment terms.

The catalogue runs to dozens of material groups and specifications - ordinary Portland cement in 50 kg bags, autoclaved aerated concrete blocks cut at 100mm x 200mm x 600mm, crusher run sold by the metric tonne - priced for Peninsular Malaysian states and East Malaysia divisions alike, roughly sixteen state-level series in total. N3C also documents companion series for labour wage rates and machinery hire rates, which tells you these material prices sit inside a working national cost-statistics programme rather than a one-off spreadsheet.

For anyone buying, selling or estimating against Malaysian construction inputs, this is the reference panel tenders get argued over. Get a sample of this dataset with your states and material groups pre-selected.

Flat, typed and joinable - one price observation per specification, state and month. Illustrative rows in the delivered column order:

group         : Cement
code          : 1.4
specification : Hume Panda / Tasek Buaya, 50kg/bag
unit          : Bag          pay_terms: 60 Del
state         : Sarawak - Sibu
month_year    : Nov-2024     average_price: 29.75

group         : Cement
code          : 1.4
specification : Hume Panda / Tasek Buaya, 50kg/bag
unit          : Bag          pay_terms: 60 Del
state         : Selangor
month_year    : Nov-2024     average_price: 21.50

The same specification also arrives in a wide layout - one row per specification with a column per month:

code          : 1.1
specification : Ordinary Portland Cement, 50 kg bag
unit          : Bag          pay_terms: 60 Del
Jan           : 20.40        Feb: 20.40    Mar: 20.40

Values above illustrate the shape of a row rather than quote a certified extract; your sample pulls live records. The long layout suits time-series joins and dashboards; the wide layout drops straight into a spreadsheet for a quantity surveyor who thinks in months. Both carry the group, code, unit and payment-term columns, so neither loses provenance.

Eleven documented fields make up the core schema, verified against the publisher's own documentation. Identity fields (group, code, specification) describe what was priced; context fields (state, unit, payment terms) describe how; the rate fields (monthly averages plus publication metadata) carry the number itself.

Geography - all Malaysian states plus selected East Malaysia divisions such as Sarawak - Sibu, roughly sixteen state-level series. Every location carries an id, a name and a state code (Selangor is SGR), so mapping to your own regions is a lookup, not a fuzzy match.

Temporal - monthly price observations. Documented sample series run November 2024 through November 2025; the publisher does not state how deep the archive reaches before that, so treat per-state depth as something to confirm at the sample stage rather than assume. Month-level publication metadata flags which months were formally released, along with the underlying sample counts.

Granularity - one average price per material specification, per state, per month. Specifications roll up to material groups (Cement, Aggregate, Bricks and siblings), and each carries its own unit - bag, metric tonne or piece - so a cement price never gets averaged into an aggregate tonnage.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

• Procurement and tender pricing - contractors benchmark supplier quotes against state-level averages before signing; the November 2024 cement pair (29.75 in Sarawak - Sibu versus 21.50 in Selangor, a 38 percent gap) is exactly the kind of spread that decides where to buy. More workflows like this on our price monitoring use case page.
• Cost estimation and escalation clauses - monthly specification-level series feed escalation calculations in multi-year contracts, replacing flat-percentage assumptions with observed movement per material.
• Producer and distributor strategy - cement and aggregates suppliers read state-by-state average levels and month-over-month shifts to spot where their pricing sits versus the national benchmark; pattern work for this lives on our competitor tracking use case page.
• Market entry and demand planning - materials vendors sizing Malaysian regions use price levels alongside project pipelines as a demand signal; forecasting methods sit on our demand forecasting use case page.
• Index construction and academic research - specification-level, state-level monthly averages are the raw layer for building Malaysia construction-cost indices or studying pass-through from input prices to tender outcomes.
• Cross-border cost comparison - analysts benchmarking Southeast Asian construction costs anchor on a government-published national series instead of vendor black-box indices.

Procurement and estimating teams get the benchmark layer for Malaysian material spend - specification-matched, state-matched, month-stamped - without assembling it from trade chatter. Market researchers and consultants get a government-published price panel spanning Peninsular and East Malaysia, usable in client work without reconciling inconsistent private sources; sector framing on our market researchers construction materials page. Data scientists and analysts get a tidy long-format table with stable state codes and group identifiers that joins cleanly onto project or company data; methods on our data scientists construction materials page. Journalists, academics and students get citable monthly numbers behind claims about construction inflation in a market where such series are rarely public.

Most material-price coverage in our catalog tracks developed markets - US producer indexes and UK materials price series dominate. A government-published, specification-level panel for Malaysia fills a different slot: emerging-market construction input prices at state resolution, which global index providers rarely reach below the national line.

It also pairs naturally with the cost siblings N3C publishes alongside it - labour wage rates and machinery hire rates - so a full tender-cost model can draw materials, labour and plant from one consistent statistical framework. Where the whole industry sits, see our best construction materials datasets ranking; for how a comparable national series stacks up method-for-method, see our ONS vs building materials price indexes comparison.

Four things. First, a zero is an absence, not a bargain: it marks a month with no published price for that specification-state pair, and the publication metadata - including sample counts per month - lets you separate thin months from missing ones.

Second, payment terms ride with every record (for example '60 Del'), which is a feature: comparisons hold the commercial basis constant instead of mixing cash and credit pricing.

Third, archive depth is asserted, not guaranteed: documented samples run November 2024 through November 2025, and earlier history is undocumented, so test the years you actually need during the sample stage.

Fourth, both layouts ship - the long specification-state-month shape for pipelines, the wide one-column-per-month shape for estimators - so decide which lands closer to your workflow and ask for it in the sample.