Abstract The present research explored psychological distress predictors including job demands, job control and social support based on underlying premises, the Job Demands-Control-Support (JDCS) and Job Demands-Control (JDC) designs. A total of 335 teachers from a district located on Malaysia's eastern coast, Kuala Terengganu, were included in the planned crosssectional study. Indeed, the results for the regression showed that job demands, job control and social support meaningfully to predict the psychological distress among teachers. The results also suggest that to prevent psychological distress among teachers, it is vital that the responsible parties pay more attention to improving job control and social support, at the same time reducing job demands. Overall this research adds to the literature corpus by using JDC and JDCS premises in the Malaysian culture setting.