For years, MS 544 has served as the code of practice for Malaysian engineers designing structural timber members using local timber species. The permissible stress design (PSD) code, published by the Department of Standards Malaysia, is closely modelled after the now obsolete British Standards code of practice CP 112. However, as the world moves rapidly towards globalization and the international engineering community having long since embraced limit state design philosophy, it is high time that Malaysian engineers do the same for structural timber by adopting the modern code of practice EN 1995-1-1. This code, also known as Eurocode 5, has been used in the United Kingdom and much of Western Europe for at least the past five years. This paper seeks to compare MS 544: 2001 and Eurocode 5 in terms of design philosophy and methodology, and highlights the similarities and differences between the two codes of practice, in particular for flexural timber design.