Rice (Oryza sativa L.) can be divided into two major categories, which is upland rice and lowland rice. Apart from being the staple food for more than half of the world population, it is also known as model plant for functional genomics study. However, it possess high amount of starch and polysaccharide that makes the isolation of good quality RNA for downstream purposes often a difficult task. While there are many studies being carried out for lowland rice extraction, none has been reported for upland rice. This study is the first to report on evaluation of three RNA extraction methods for three Malaysian upland rice cultivars in order to determine the best method to isolate high grade RNA. The result obtained demonstrated that good quality RNA in terms of integrity, purity and quality can be isolated from young leaves of these cultivars by using guanidine isothiocyanate based extraction method that is fast, simple and efficient and had been proven suitable for further downstream applications.